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Anonymous Disrupts UK Government Sites

08.04.2012
Three UK government websites, including one for the country's Prime Minister, were attacked by the hacker collective Anonymous late Saturday night in protest of extradition of British citizens to the United States and of a proposed law to broaden the snooping powers of the government there.

The hacktivists disrupted traffic at three sites -- (Home Office), (Prime Minister's Office) and (Ministry of Justice) -- through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

DDoS attacks take a website offline by flooding it with more traffic than it can handle.

All the government sites appeared to be functioning normally on Sunday morning.

Anonymous also identified the personal website of Home Secretary Theresa May as a target and mounted an assault on the site for the U.S. House of Representatives. The attack on May's site never materialized and the one on Congress was rebuffed, .

The attacks were part of what Anonymous is calling Operation Trial at Home, a protest against the extradition to the United States of two British nationals, Richard O'Dwyer and Christopher Tappin, and proposed extradition of a third, Gary McKinnon.