(Reuters) – A British government website was disrupted on Sunday by an attack thought to be by activist hacker group Anonymous, whose previous high-profile targets have included the Vatican.
The website of Britain’s Home Office, or interior ministry, (homeoffice.gov.uk) was out of action for several hours overnight and problems continued on Sunday, when visitors found the message “page not found”.
“The Home Office website was the subject of an online protest last night,” a spokeswoman for the ministry said.
“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,” she said.
Twitter messages purporting to be from Anonymous said the group was behind the distributed denial-of-service attack, in which hackers flood a website with requests for information, making it unavailable to legitimate users.
The messages warned there would be further attacks on British government websites every Saturday.
via UPDATE 1-UK government website disrupted by hacker attack | Reuters.
