Australian websites hacked by a group that wants to 'stop killing people in Syria'

Australian websites have been hacked by a group urging authorities to "stop killing people in Syria." The group calls themselves Tunisian Fallaga Team, and was previously responsible for hacking French, Tunisian, and Israeli websites.

Among the Australian sites that were hacked included timpallas.com.au, the website of Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas. This has caused the site to be briefly taken down on Wednesday morning.

Timpallas.com.au displayed photographs of people suffering in Syria. The Tunisian Fallaga Team utilises the hashtags #Op_Russia and #save_aleppo.

The hacked site also showed a YouTube video that shows footage of attacks by Islamist extremists. Pallas’s site briefly displayed hacked content but was eventually replaced with a message announcing that the official site was "briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance." Timpallas.com.au has now been restored.

News.com.au has learned that the website of the Catholic Santa Maria College in Northcote in Melbourne was also hit by the same group of hackers. Even Catholic College Bendigo’s site was also hacked. Both websites, like timpallas.com.au, were attacked by the online hackers on Wednesday morning.

The official site of Empyrean Education Institute, a commercial cookery, hospitality and business college in Western Australia, is also believed to have been hacked. Websites from outside the country has also been recently hit. These include a Pakistani newspaper site and a website for a home technology company in Russia.

According to a public statement by a member of the Tunisian Fallaga Team, the Islamist group is specifically against secularism and atheism. The group claims themselves to be an extension of the Islamic State (ISIS).

The Twitter page (@Fallaga_Team) was created on Dec. 24, 2014. The social media account is primarily being used to post links to hacked servers and promote hashtags of current operations such as #OpIsrael or #OpFrance.

There is also an existing Facebook page created for the group. It features pictures, videos, and statements that detail its political and religious ideologies.