The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/24/hacktivists_ddos_10_downing_st/

Hacktivists DDoS 10 Downing St site

Also sundry anti-war defacements

By John Leyden

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

Cloud based data management

UK government website 10 Downing Street [1] (also at this URL [2]) was briefly rendered inaccessible [3] 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 [4]), 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 [5], links to a record of this supposed defacement [6], 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 [7] of the brief defacement of Whitehouse.gov [8]. The site [9], which uses an Apache on Linux [10] platform, is now up and running.

Separately, defacement group Carders defaced 3,000 (seemingly random [11]) Web sites, again over the weekend. Its motives in this attack remain unclear, though it likely that these sites [12] were also attacked as part of an anti-war protest. ®

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