U.K. Serious Organised Crime Agency Website Disrupted by Hackers

U.K. The Serious Organised Crime Agency’s website was disrupted yesterday after it was targeted by computer hackers.

The crime agency temporarily took the website out of service after it was hit by a so-called distributed denial of service attack last night, said Stuart Hadley, a SOCA spokesman. The agency’s website was also attacked last year by hackers linked to the groups LulzSec and Anonymous.

A DDOS attack occurs when a website is visited by a large number of visits causing the web address to go off line. SOCA’s website remains out of service today.

“The action was taken to limit the impact of a DDOS attack on other clients hosted by our service provider,” the agency said in an e-mailed statement today. “SOCA’s website contains only publicly available information and does not provide access to operational material.”

A British man was arrested in June for attacking websites including SOCA’s and charged with committing unauthorized acts with a computer.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeremy Hodges in London at jhodges17@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net