Plans by Anonymous to launch a distributed denial of service attack against www.governo.it were changed half an hour before the attack was scheduled to commence. The group used IRC, Twitter, Pastebin and image sharing sites to advertise the attack a day before it was due to start, but the surprise change meant that www.italia.gov.it unexpectedly ended up bearing the brunt of the attack.

The DDoS attack against www.italia.gov.it was immediately successful, with the site becoming inaccessible from 14:00 UTC on Thursday. The attack appeared to subside a few hours later and the site is now functioning normally with no apparent changes to its infrastructure.

After seeing how easily its “lulzcannon” were able to take down www.italia.gov.it, some members of Anonymous called for the original target, www.governo.it, to be attacked as well. It was not apparent how many people took part in this secondary attack, but it appeared to have a minimal impact on the site’s availability: