Swimming Australia's website has been hit by a denial of service (DOS) attack "in the wake" of Olympic Gold Medalist Mack Horton's comments "about his Chinese competitor being a drug cheat," according to Donna Field of ABC. The site is reportedly operating in an "under attack" mode after Horton's comments about Sun Yang "being a drug cheat." While the site has continued to operate, "it has deployed software to check the veracity of every browser accessing the page to ensure they are legitimate." Swimming Australia "is not commenting publicly but it is understood the attack has been referred to the Government for investigation" (ABC, 8/11). REUTERS' Brendan Goh reported thousands of "vitriolic comments" left on Horton's Instagram account "have been deleted" by the Australian Olympic Committee. Netizens, many of them Chinese, "bombarded Horton's social media accounts" after he called Sun a "drug cheat" before they competed in Saturday's 400m freestyle final, "demanding that he apologize." By Wednesday, all comments -- which numbered "at least 200,000 on one photo post alone" -- had disappeared from Horton's page. AOC Dir of Media & Communications Mike Tancred said, "My staff are instructed to remove any comments that are offensive and in breach of the AOC's Social Media Guidelines. Comments must not be disrespectful, threatening or in poor taste." The spat between Horton and Sun "is turning into a battle of national media commentators" and underlines how the issue of doping has become a "defining issue" for these Olympics. Chinese state media reacted to Horton's remarks by calling Australia "uncivilized" and "Britain's offshore prison," while the Australian delegation said that it would "support Horton's right to speak freely on the issue" (REUTERS, 8/10).
NEW FRONTIER: In Hong Kong, James Porteous reported Australians "are wondering if a cyber-attack that took down the country’s first attempt to conduct an online census is the latest front in this sporting war." And elsewhere online, the website of Swimming Australia was operating in "under attack" mode after also "seemingly being hit." The Australian Bureau of Statistics, which conducts the census, "finally got its website back online on Thursday after it was out of action for 43 hours because of cyber-attacks." A cyber-security expert in Australia said that "it's not way out of left field [as a motivation]" that Sun's fans -- angry over Horton's repeated claims that the Chinese swimmer is a drug cheat -- "could have been behind it." Suelette Dreyfuss "made the claim in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald." She said that the DDoS attack -- "where a website is swamped with traffic from 'bots' to take down the server" -- seemed too "noisy" and "unsubtle" to be the work of professionals (SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST, 8/11).
