The Anonymous collective has vowed to target British Government sites every week, bringing them offline by overloading them with traffic.
So-called “hacktivists” were able to launch their cyber attack on Saturday night despite announcing it days in advance, raising questions about the effectiveness of Whitehall internet security.
The British branch of Anonymous – a loose global collective of computer hackers who often target law-enforcement websites – first advertised “#OpTrialAtHome” last Monday.
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| The Anonymous hacking network uses as a logo the mask from the comic V For Vendetta |
A poster featured the photos of three British citizens who have been sent to the US to face trial – Gary McKinnon, Richard O’Dwyer and Christopher Tappin – together with the slogan “Fight extradition”.
It included the address of the Home Office website and the direction to “charge ya lazers” on Saturday at 9pm GMT.
Supporters would understand this to be an order to join in a “distributed denial-of-service attack” on the website, in which thousands of computers are used to send a flood of requests to visit the victim’s homepage, causing its servers to buckle under the demand.
At the appointed hour, Anonymous Twitter feeds ordered followers to “fire your Laz0rs”, and soon reported “Tango Down” as the target was hit.
Screenshots showed that the Home Office website was inaccessible from 9pm and service was reportedly patchy until Sunday morning.
A Home Office spokesman said: “The Home Office website was the subject of on online protest last night.
“This is a public-facing website and no sensitive information is held on it. There is no indication that the site was hacked and other Home Office systems were not affected.
“Measures put in place to protect the website meant that members of the public were unable to access the site intermittently.
“We will continue to monitor the situation and take measures accordingly.”
The activists also brought down the Downing Street website at about 10.30pm, but a spokesman for the Prime Minister said it only lasted for a “couple of minutes” and there was no suggestion of it being hacked into. The Ministry of Justice denied the hackers’ claims that its website had also been taken offline.
Anonymous explained on Twitter: “It’s a digital protest which is different [from] hacking. UK want their government to listen. We can do it as long as it takes.
“Selling your citizens to foreigners is not acceptable! We are Anonymous, we do not forget, we do not forgive.”
Another message from the group said: “EXPECT a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) every Saturday on the UK Government sites.”
Source: Telegraph
