IN.gov hit with RFRA-related cyberattack

Indiana's state government website was hit with another cyberattack Tuesday that appears related to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Some users of the website IN.gov experienced intermittent outages and slow page load times Tuesday, according to the Indiana Office of Technology. The sluggishness was a result of a Denial of Service attack that sends many traffic requests to a site at one time, overwhelming it and preventing pages from loading. The attack began at 2:40 p.m.

It was the second such attack since Friday, when a group with the Twitter handle @YourVikingdom claimed responsibility for an attack that disrupted the site for about an hour.

On Tuesday, a group with the handle @RedVikingdom appeared to be responsible, tweeting "IN.GOV #OFFLINE Thanks to all my friends." It received a thank you from someone who used the #BoycottIndiana hashtag, which has been employed by a number of people and groups who object to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The technology office said Vikingdom has claimed responsibility for similar attacks on at least 40 state and local websites over the past two weeks.

Call Star reporter Robert King at (317) 444-6089. Follow him on Twitter: @Rbtking.