The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the official telecom agency of the United Nations, reported Thursday that one of its websites experienced service outages on Wednesday, disrupting a controversial global telecom summit taking place this week and next in Dubai, called the World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (WCIT-12).
The ITU said the disruption prevented delegates from accessing important documents critical to their ongoing debates about updating older international agreements to cover the Internet, and noted that “some hacker groups are claiming responsibility,” an apparent nod to self-identified Anonymous hacktivists, who took to Twitter on Wednesday to claim responsibility for the outage, as The Daily Dot noted.
The ITU said the incident, though overcome, “reinforces importance of cybersecurity.” The ITU and the WCIT-12 conference have been criticized as being secretive and potentially detrimental to the future growth and openness of the Internet by many Western advocacy groups, the European Parliament and Google.
