The website of UK broadsheet the Daily Telegraph is returning to normal after a sustained denial of service attack left the site intermittently unavailable over the last two days.

Unknown hackers bombarded the telegraph.co.uk with thousands of spurious requests from around 9am yesterday morning. The site was largely unavailable but returned to service at around 11am today before dropping offline at 2pm and returning later this afternoon. Such a pattern is not unusual for denial of service attacks as hackers vary patterns of attack while defenders establish defences designed to offload spurious traffic.

Cyber-attacks have been much in the news of late. Last week, Russian and European leaders held a summit in the aftermath of a three-week cycle of denial of service attacks targeting the Baltic countries' internet infrastructure.

Estonian officials said they had traced back the IP addresses involved in the attack to the address space of the Russian government, prompting speculation that the attacks were officially sanctioned, though the use by hackers of compromised Russian government systems is another possibility. ®

Related stories

• Updated Consumer revenge site returns after DDoS attack (29 October 2007)
• Spanish TV turns Wiki-hoaxer (20 August 2007)
• Rival malware gangs wage turf war (1 July 2007)
• Large-scale DOS attack menace continues to grow (11 June 2007)
• The Mirror website cracked (30 May 2007)
• Peer-to-peer networks co-opted for DOS attacks (30 May 2007)
• Student detained following attacks on Estonian websites (7 May 2007)
• Estonian/Russian statue riots spill online (1 May 2007)
• Comment Organised crime fails to stop skiddies (20 October 2006)
• DDoS by mobile phone: is it a goer? (10 October 2005)
• Victims coughing up to online extortionists (6 October 2005)
• UK under cyber blitz (16 June 2005)
• Japan.gov weathers DDoS attack (24 February 2005)