War Protestors Stage Cyber Sit-Ins

Antiwar protestors closed down the U.K. government's 10 Downing Street Web site for a short period over the weekend.

Posting on independent media site Indymedia Sunday, protestors claimed to have made the site, and other government sites, temporarily inaccessible due to a denial of service attack.

Jason Holloway, U.K. general manager of security company F-Secure UK, in Cambridge, England, confirmed Tuesday that the site was down because of a DoS attack.

F-Secure has been tracking war-related attacks and Number 10 is not alone in this: More than 20,000 sites have been attacked in the past week, Holloway said.

"We have a big database of all the places that have been hacked, either denial of service or they have been defaced. The vast majority [of the hackers] are antiwar but there are also anti-U.S. and anti-Muslim [attacks]," Holloway said.

Sites such as the Electrohippie Collective's have been encouraging such attacks, offering downloadable Java programs that will run "cyber sit-ins" from the user's computer. The Electrohippie site is specifically targeting Number 10 and the U.S. White House sites.

F-Secure has heard unconfirmed reports that the White House site has been hit by a similar attack, "but that's only from one source," Holloway said.

A Downing Street spokesperson said Monday that he did not know whether the site had been attacked.