Anti-war protestors closed down the UK government's 10
Downing Street website for a short period over the
weekend.
In a posting on the independent media site Indymedia,
uk.indymedia.org, on 23
March protestors claimed to have made the site, and other
government sites, temporarily inaccessible due to a
denial-of-service attack (DOS).
Jason Holloway, UK general manager of Cambridge-based
security firm F-Secure UK, confirmed on the site had suffered a
DOS attack.
F-Secure has been tracking war-related attacks and 10 Downing
Street is not alone in this: more than 20,000 sites have been
attacked in the past week, Holloway said.
"We have a large database of all the places that have been
hacked, either denial-of-service or they have been defaced. The
vast majority [of the hackers] are anti-war but there are also
anti-US and anti-Muslim [attacks]," Holloway said.
Sites such as the Electrohippie Collective's
www.fraw.org.uk/ehippies/
have been encouraging such attacks, offering downloadable Java
programs that will run "cyber sit-ins" from the user's computer.
The Electrohippie site is specifically targeting 10 Downing
Street and the US White House sites.
F-Secure has heard unconfirmed reports that the White House site
has been hit by a similar attack, "but that is only from one
source", Holloway said.
A Downing Street spokesman said he did not know whether or not
the site had been attacked.