Rio Olympics 2016: Swimming Australia’s official website suffers cyber attack

SWIMMING Australia’s website has been hit by a suspected cyber attack.

The attack comes in the wake of allegations by the Olympic gold medallist Mack Horton that his Chinese competitor Sun Yang was a drug cheat.

The site is operating in an “under attack” mode and has deployed software to check every browser accessing the page to ensure they are legitimate, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

It said the website had been hit by a denial of service attack. A DOS is defined as an attempt to make a network unavailable to its intended users, which can be done by flooding the website with requests for access.

Horton’s social media was bombarded with hundreds of thousands of negative comments from China following his comments.

Yang retorted, saying: “I don’t care too much what the Australian athlete says … I’m clean; I’ve done everything it takes to prove I’m clean.”

Swimming Australia is not commenting publicly but it is understood the attack has been referred to the Government for investigation.

Yang served a three-month suspension in 2014 after testing positive to a banned substance.