UK government website 10 Downing Street (http://www.number-10.gov.uk) (also at this URL (http://www.pm.gov.uk)) was briefly rendered inaccessible (http://uk.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=59053&group=webcast) 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 (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?mode_u=on&mode_w=on&site=www.number-10.gov.uk)), 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 (http://www.zone-h.org/en/news/read/id=2501), links to a record of this supposed defacement (http://www.zataz.com/zatazv7/images/images_news/whb.jpg), 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 (http://www.zataz.com/zatazv7/images/images_news/whb.jpg) of the brief defacement of Whitehouse.gov (http://www.whitehouse.gov). The site (http://www.whitehouse.gov), which uses an Apache on Linux (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.whitehouse.gov) platform, is now up and running.

Separately, defacement group Carders defaced 3,000 (seemingly random (http://www.zone-h.org/en/news/read/id=2504/)) Web sites, again over the weekend. Its motives in this attack remain unclear, though it likely that these sites (http://against_war.tripod.com) were also attacked as part of an anti-war protest. ®

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