The websites of the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) and the Global Atheist Convention have been the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack two days ago. As a result, the websites were knocked offline for extended periods of time and their owners had to change the hosting provider.

Denial of service has long been one of the weapons of choice for hacktivists, whether they support or protest against an event. Notable examples include the Iranian DDoS mob who attacked governmental websites during the last election scandal, or the Anonymous attacks against the Church of Scientology.

These attacks are instrumented by sending an unusually large number of fake data packets to a server until it uses up all its resources trying to process them and becomes unresponsive. Doing this from a big number of IPs is called a "distributed" denial of service attack and is lot harder to repel without affecting the target.

This is what happened during the recent attack against the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites, forcing their respective hosting providers to cut them off the Internet, in order to protect other customers. The sites became unresponsive at about 5:20 p.m. local time on October 20 and were not restored until well into the next day.

"This was a network attack and we have been informed it was specifically aimed at our websites. While we do not know source or reason for the attacks, they came in the wake of news that Global Atheist Convention has already sold 1,000 tickets and will be the largest gathering of atheists and other freethinkers in Australia’s history," an official announcement reads. The 2010 edition of the Global Atheist Convention is set to take place between March 12 and 14 in Melbourne, Australia.

"This may not be just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech," AFA's President David Nicholls commented for The Age. "Our aim is to keep the Australian government, education and welfare systems secular. Unfortunately, some people in our society find that very confronting," he added.