Japanese PM's website hacked by whaling protesters

Hacktivists claim to have crashed Shinzo Abe’s website in protest at Japan’s
Antarctic mission to kill whales for ‘research’

Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Thursday 10 December 2015 14.40 GMT

Hackers have claimed to have disabled the website of the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in protest at his country’s decision to resuming its whaling programme in the Southern ocean, in defiance of international opinion.

A tweet, purportedly from a member of the loose collective of hacktivists, Anonymous, and addressed to Abe’s Twitter account, said: “Whaling is not cultural right! Your website is #TangoDown!”

The tweet was accompanied by a screenshot showing that connections to the site were not working. The website appeared to have returned to normal late on Thursday afternoon.

The government’s top spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, acknowledged that the site had been inaccessible since early in the day.

Another Anonymous Twitter account said the group had not been responsible for the attack on Abe’s site. Instead, the action appears to have been taken by a sympathiser, operating under the Anonymous umbrella, angered by Japan’s slaughter of whales and dolphins.

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