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Hacktivists DDoS 10 Downing St site

Also sundry anti-war defacements

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Security, 24th March 2003 12:47 GMT

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UK government website 10 Downing Street (also at this URL) was briefly rendered inaccessible yesterday after a co-ordinated denial of service attack protesting the Prime Minster's role in the conflict.

The site, which runs IIS on Win2K (according to Netcraft), is back on-line.

Unconfirmed reports suggest hackers went one step further with the Whitehouse site, reportedly spraying it with anti-war graffiti. Defacement archive, Zone-h.org, links to a record of this supposed defacement, although its report contain a strong caveat that it wasn't able to capture and confirm the attack itself. Zone-h's affiliate ZATAZ Magazine provides an archive of the brief defacement of Whitehouse.gov. The site, which uses an Apache on Linux platform, is now up and running.

Separately, defacement group Carders defaced 3,000 (seemingly random) Web sites, again over the weekend. Its motives in this attack remain unclear, though it likely that these sites were also attacked as part of an anti-war protest. ®

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