Nissan has been targeted by Hacktivists linked to the Anonymous as a mark of protest for the killing of whales and dolphins in Japan.
Nissan‘s nissan-global.com domains went offline after the DDoS attack that bombarded the website with traffic.
Japan has come under fire for hunting of whales and dolphins, with the practice having a hand in leaving species including blue, fin and humpback whales endangered.
It has triggered international outrage and activists, environmental organisations and celebrities have shown their protest against the practice.
BBC cited one of the hackers as saying: "They are a big corporation in Japan, and we have targeted big corporations to spread awareness about the killing [of dolphins] in the cove in Taiji because the Japanese news is censoring it," he said.
"As a note for Nissan, we are not out to harm your customer data or system data."
However, Nissan said that it has no view on such hunting activities.
Apart from Nissan the hackers have also targeted the personal website of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a whale museum and a resort that features dolphins.
The attack on Nissan’s website is reportedly related to the cyber-attacks against Icelandic institutions in November which was a part of the OpWhales campaign, in which most of the country’s government sites were made unavailable for about 13 hours.
