DDoS attacks topple 40 Swedish sites

Swedish authorities have few leads in their investigation of a massive denial-of-service attack on Thursday that downed about 40 websites belonging to police and media outlets.

According to The Local, the attacks flooded media IT development firm Adeprimo with some 400,000 requests per second, compared with the 800 requests that are typical. Sites that use Adeprimo's media platform were among the hardest hit. They included the main Gothenburg paper Goteborg-Posten, which was inaccessible from early morning to about noon on Thursday.

A separate wave of attacks later on Thursday knocked the website for the Swedish police out of commission for a couple of hours.

Investigators say both attacks were well executed and are most likely linked because the the amount of traffic was almost identical for each. They said the torrent appeared to originate in Asia, but of course, that says little about where the attackers may have been located.

All of the media companies affected rent server space from Swedish IT service provider Basefarm. ®