This article was published on November 2, 2009

Swedish Police and 40 Other Sites Suffer DDoS Attacks


Swedish Police and 40 Other Sites Suffer DDoS Attacks

attack-of-the-bots_1A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack severely disrupted Sweden’s police administration web site last week.

Swedish authorities still haven’t discovered who was behind a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which rendered a number of major Swedish websites, including the country’s police site, inaccessible yesterday.

“We’re the victims of an ongoing DDoS attack,” The Local has spokesperson Linda Widmark saying, “shortly before the site, polisen.se, became accessible again at around 5pm”.

At its peak the attack caused traffic to spike from 800 requests a second to more than 400,000.

Since then, the attack also taken down as many as 40 media sites all hosted by service provider Basefarm. The Local reported that, as of Friday evening Swedish time, neither the hosting firm nor police investigators knew who was behind the attacks or their motive for taking the sites down.

Lennart Rosqvist, head of IT at Göteborgs-Posten (GP), a Mktmedia newspapers hit by the attack, was critical of Basefarm.

“He added that the incident should serve as a lesson to webmasters about the dangers of having a centralized system rather than a decentralized system,” says the story.

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