SOCA website brought down by DDoS cyber attack – for second time in a year

The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has confirmed that its website has suffered a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, effectively preventing internet users from reaching it.

This is the second time in less than a year that SOCA’s website has found itself the target of malicious attackers, having previously suffered from a DDoS attack at the hands of the notorious LulzSec gang in June 2011.

A SOCA spokesperson told TechWeekEurope that the website was taken offline at approximately 10pm on Wednesday, but that there was no security risk for the organisation.

“The reason we take it down is to prevent and limit any impact on the clients hosted by our service provider. Clearly…

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.