Some simple instructions + JS web applications allowed thousands of people from Poland to DDoS those websites on their own
Willful participation in a DDoS doesn't sound like a good idea (being a criminal offense in Poland) just as much as the whole concept of getting the government to change their mind by taking down their websites (especially those belonging to parties not involved in the ACTA ratification process). One thing that folks behind this seem to have failed to learn from the SOPA battle is to make it impossible for the government to present the protesters as the bad guys in this situation in the mass media.
Yes, but I think that much of the public sentiment is that the very same mass media not covering ACTA is the one behind this kind of policies. So, they try to make it impossible for them not to cover the story. Sadly, I fear that this kind of action may be presented as valid examples of why the Internet must be regulated.
Polish people tend to always think that protesters are right just because they protest and the Government is wrong just because it is the Government. Hence, I wouldn't worry too much about this what the Government will tell to the public about the protesters. The public will know better as it always does in Poland.
Actually, this is just one of the reasons why I live in Poland even though I'm an US citizen. People just distrust the Government and the media here so much. It is fantastic!
I'm Polish myself and I'm not sure I can fully agree with your optimism as there have been a few cases under the current administration in which controversial laws managed to pass thanks to the government's ability to "properly" depict their target groups (the football stadium ban is one example). You might be right that it might not be effective in this case. Still, my point was that there are many lawful ways to bring the media's attention to the problem. In the case of SOPA, shutting down Wikipedia and other sites for one day was a great example. It not only had a major impact on many people's lives but actually was an argument in itself (What would a post-SOPA world look like?). What point does killing a bunch of .gov websites prove?
As I see it, the point of the attack is to get media attention. This way you get public attention. And thus you raise awareness - and the number of participants in incoming protests.
So yeah, I'm actually really happy these takedowns took place, as long as it generates a lot of buzz in the media.
Just saying... I remember the time in 90s when Polish coal miners didn't get guarantees from the Government regarding their pension plans. Well, they basically went to Warsaw and started riots. Real riots. As far as I remember they literally kidnapped member of the Administration or two. They destroyed a few government building in Warsaw. They terrorized and paralyzed the Government.
Next thing you know, the Government agreed to each and every one of the protesters requests. As I said: I love Poland Man.
They fought hard with the police and caused some real damage to some of the government buildings, but there was no kidnapping, or terror. Poland is not some wild, crazy country.
Also, most of the society was against the protests and was literally pissed off on miners and on government (for the fact that they indeed agreed to most of the requests of the miners).
That's exactly what I meant by terrorized. The miners did occupy Government building and they did destroy some of them and yes they did terrorize some of the high level Government officials by locking them up in their own offices and not allowing to get out.
Yes, Poland IS a wild country. That is its biggest strength. Poor Americans just have to deal with whatever laws thrown at them by their Government. Here, in Poland - not really.
According to this text: http://prawo.vagla.pl/node/9637 (in Polish, from a lawyer who is against ACTA), there was no real attack on any of the mentioned sites, it was just that there was so much interest in the case that some sites went down due to naturally increased traffic. Case in point: his own website went down, even though he is against ACTA.
Well, so let's be more specific about the alleged attack.
1) At least one target was attacked quite literally. The website of the Polish Parliament was defaced and subsequently taken down by its admins.
[This is the supposed deface image: http://bit.ly/wkygL4. The caption reads "Nothing is impossible! Cheers, gentlemen!"]
2) ACTA is a very new thing to the wider public (even the "trendy" internet public). First, on Jan 20 it made the front page of the biggest newspaper of record, Gazeta Wyborcza. And today ACTA was mentioned in the main TV news program (Wiadomosci on TVP1). The latter almost certainly triggered a wave of searches and attempts to access various sites. In result many website failures (the lawyer's, the Panoptykon Foundation, perhaps even Ministry of Culture) can be attributed to a sudden spike in interest.
[The lawyer mentioned in previous post has stated specifically that he has investigated the nature of the traffic and it doesn't look like a DDoS. Which is kind of credible, since each machine participating in a DoS sends gazillions of requests from the same IP, so it's distinctive from a visitor sending like 5 requests in total.]
3) That said, it's not an outlandish assumption that someone also had their way with the biggest sites of the Polish Government. A DDoS could have contributed to the whole mess.
The simplest way is to use netstat and check amount of connections from each host. If you see plenty hosts with many connections established, that's DDoS. If there is plenty hosts, but each one has few connections, thats DoS (aka slash dot effect), mentioned by Tomek_.
PS: DDoS - distributed denial-of-service attack. Deliberate attack which involves dedicated software; DoS - denial-of-service. Server can't handle all requests, because suddenly there is more of them (because of link on frontpage etc)
It's worth being noted that the latest attacks on government's websites are top headlines on majority of Polish news sites at the moment. Both the attacks and ACTA are being covered on news TV channels and radio. Apparently, taking down government's website is a remarkably good method of raising interest of media.
I just hope it doesn't get interpreted in media as "hackers destroy government property using pirated software - that's what ACTA is supposed to stop". I wouldn't be surprised at all if that happened.
Update - 80,000 new people joined the case since yesterday, street protests started literally right now (Gdansk - around 2000 ppl expected), new government websites down.
Check the biggest web portal: http://www.onet.pl/. The top (bold) news item is about ACTA, and there also is a featured "10 things you need to know about ACTA" article on main page.
Same in all TV and radio.
They've taken down quite a few websites that I wouldn't really associate with acta. There is also quite a lot of people making general mess around the situation. Nevertheless, I've never seen an action like that in the Polish "corner" of the Internet, quite remarkable.
As I got up on a late Sunday morning, all major news outlets are talking both about the alleged attacks and about ACTA itself. Sunday talk shows are talking about ACTA. The Govt spokesman starts assuring people that they won't rush anything and ACTA will be consulted.
ACTA suddenly came into mainstream public debate.
Where else did that happen in the world? I'm friggin proud of my country. :]
Oh, and BTW, signups on Facebook for the street protest against ACTA have jumped from 13,000 to 19,000 in 12 hours. :]
Willful participation in a DDoS doesn't sound like a good idea (being a criminal offense in Poland) just as much as the whole concept of getting the government to change their mind by taking down their websites (especially those belonging to parties not involved in the ACTA ratification process). One thing that folks behind this seem to have failed to learn from the SOPA battle is to make it impossible for the government to present the protesters as the bad guys in this situation in the mass media.