UK has been going down on online privacy and freedom list. It recently tabled a bill to that end and has also extradited a number of personnel to US recently. As a result of this, Anonymous has announced that it will be attacking UK government sites. The first target was the Home Office website.
We received the earliest hints of this new campaign by Anonymous when it tweeted on April 4: ‘Expect a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) every Saturday on the UK Government sites.’
Eventually, claims were made by a number of Anonymous members present on Twitter that they have taken down the Home Office website through DDoS attacks. The claims seemed quite genuine since access to Home Office website on Saturday night was denied.
However, the problem didn’t last long and the website was back to normal soon, with the officials declaring that no sensitive information has been lost. The reasons cited by Anonymous members on Twitter for these attacks ranged from protest against extradition from UK to US to the draconian surveillance proposals by the UK government.
A spokesperson for the Home Office had this to say for the said attack, “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.’
UK has recently extradited a number of British citizens over charges of different crimes. The contention of Anonymous is that even if the said person has committed a crime, he or she must be tried in UK and should not be ‘shipped’ out to US.
[ttjad]
