Anonymous hit multiple UK government websites over Easter weekend

The website of the house Office was out of action for several hours over the Easter weekend after a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by hacktivists Anonymous.

According to Reuters, homeoffice.gov.uk was out of action for several hours on Saturday night and into Easter Sunday, with visitors finding the message "page not found".

The Home Office said: “The website was the topic of a web protest last night. There isn't any indication that the location was hacked and other Home Office systems weren't affected. Measures installed place to give protection to the web site meant that members of the general public were unable to access the location intermittently.”

Anonymous said the gang was behind the DDoS attack, and tweets suggested a lot of motives, including Government plans to raise digital surveillance powers and Britain's extradition treaty with the united states, particularly in terms of the case of Gary McKinnon.

It said: “Why TANGO DOWN the united kingdom govt? Proposed draconian surveillance measures together with continued derogation of civil liberties.”

The messages warned there could be further attacks on Government websites every Saturday.

Elsewhere, the Ministry of Justice told techweekeurope.co.uk that its site was down for around half-hour on Saturday evening. “Access was quickly restored and the web site is now operating as normal,” a spokesperson said.

Jeremy Nicholls, channel and business development director EMEA at Arbor Networks, said: “As revealed in Arbor Networks' Worldwide Infrastructure Report in February, ideological hacktivism has replaced cyber crime because the main motivation behind DDoS attacks. What we've seen with the emergence of hacktivist groups is the democratisation of DDoS.

“Any business operating online â€" which implies practically any type and size of organisation â€" can become a target, with the aid of who they're, what they sell or who they partner with. Furthermore, the explosion of cheap and readily accessible attack tools is enabling anyone to hold out DDoS attacks. This has profound implications for the threat landscape, risk profile, network architecture and security deployments of internet operators and internet-connected organisations.

“I've seen it stated that there is not much an establishment can do to forestall these attacks; and that's simply not the case. Best practice dictates organisations have both on-premise protection in addition to cloud-based protection from a merchant.”