The hacker group known as Anonymous has struck again, and this time the target is the official website of Spain’s national police force.
According to the BBC, www.policia.es was down for at least an hour on June 12th.
Spanish authorities would not confirm that Anonymous was behind the attack, saying only that the site was offline.
However, a statement was posted on a website linked to Anonymous, claimed responsibility for the hack, which it called #OpPolicia.
The group said it had used a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) which bombards a target website with so much data that it becomes overwhelmed.
This latest attack directly follows last week’s arrest of three people in Spain believed to be Anonymous’ local leadership. The trio was arrested for their supposed involvement in the security breach of Sony’s PlayStation Network this spring, but apparently they’ve been on the radar for months for hacking several other government and financial websites in multiple countries.
Spain wasn’t alone in arresting Anonymous members. Turkish police detained 32 people suspected to be members of the online group. Reasons for the arrests in Turkey depend on which side you listen to. According to Reuters, Turkish authorities argued that the group was suspected of planned attacks on several websites, while Anonymous members claim that their actions were in protest to “government censorship of the Internet.”
Anonymous also garnered attention worldwide for its involvement in the first major hack attack on the PlayStation Network in early April. The group subsequently denied that it had any hand in the attack that brought down PSN worldwide for several weeks starting in late April.
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