A tweet purporting to be from Anonymous, a diffuse international collective of online hacker activists, warned of cyberattacks on the websites of two major airports earlier this month, police sources said Saturday. A day later, the web pages of Narita and Chubu airports were struck down.
On Oct. 10, the website of Narita International Airport went down for about eight hours from around 2:30 a.m. after being overwhelmed by multiple-source traffic.
The website of Chubu Centrair International Airport also became difficult to access for 8½ hours.
Flights at the airports were unaffected.
According to investigative sources from the Chiba and Aichi prefectural police, the Twitter post on Oct. 9 said attacks would be made on two major Japanese airports.
It gave the addresses of Narita and Chubu airports.
The sources said the websites of the two facilities apparently suffered "distributed denial of service" or DDoS attacks, which are intended to paralyze a targeted website by overwhelming it with high levels of traffic sent from multiple network sources.
The website of the town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture experienced a similar cyberattack in September, which police suspect was made by Anonymous in protest of the town's longtime practice of hunting of dolphins whereby the mammals are killed or captured after being herded into a cove. The slaughter has become a cause celebre for animal rights activists and others.