Anonymous takes down Home Office website

                      

The Home Office website was hit by hackers this weekend, with Anonymous claiming responsibility. A denial of service attack brought down the public-facing website on Saturday evening

Anonymous succeeded, this weekend, in taking down the Home Office website in a pre-planned denial of service attack.

The hacktivist group followed through on a threat to attack UK government websites each and every Saturday, following the revelation of controversial plans to monitor the email, web use and phone calls of citizens.

On Wednesday April 4th, the group tweeted: "Expect a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) every Saturday on the UK Government sites."

Sure enough, despite offering three days' warning, the group was able to bring down the homeoffice.gov.uk site, from 21:00 BST on Saturday night, with interruptions continuing until 05:00 as requests overwhelmed the server.

On Saturday, Anonymous tweeted: "TANGO DOWN - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk For your draconian surveillance proposals! Told you to #ExpectUs!"

The attack also came in protest of extradition policy, which has allowed UK citizens to be sent to the US for trial, on crimes committed in the UK. The alleged hacker and Asperger's syndrome sufferer Gary McKinnon, has been fighting extradition for a decade.

The Home Office released a statement claiming that measured had now been put in place to prevent future outages, while assuring that no sensitive data had been lost or stolen.

She 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."

Via: BBC