SAN FRANCISCO – After Spain’s national police arrested three hackers allegedly linked to Anonymous and the Sony PlayStation Network hacks, the amorphous collective claims to have successfully taken the agency’s site offline in retaliation.
According to a Saturday posting on AnonOps Communications, “Operation Policia (#OpPolicia) is the name for the successful DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack that paralyzed the Official National Police website (P�gina Oficial del Cuerpo Nacional de Polic�a www.policia.es) for hours on Saturday, making it inaccessible to visitors, CNET News.Com reported. The DDoS attack is a protest tactic often deployed by Anonymous.”
The daily newspaper El Mundo reported Sunday that the police site had been offline for about an hour the previous day and that police were still investigating the cause.
Following the announcement of the arrests on Friday, Anonymous issued a statement condemning them and foreshadowing the attack on the National police site:
Arresting somebody for taking part in a DDoS attack is exactly like arresting somebody for attending a peaceful demonstration in their hometown. Anonymous believes this right to peacefully protest is one of the fundamental pillars of any democracy…
You have not detained three participants of Anonymous. We have no members and we are not a group of any kind. You have, however, detained three civilians expressing themselves…
You are providing us with the fuel, but now you must expect the fire.
Meanwhile, in another hacktivist campaign, the Anonymous group has targeted a government site in Turkey over a proposed new Internet censorship plan.
The site for Turkey’s Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) was the target.
“Over the last few years, we have seen how the Turkish government has tightened its grip on the internet. It has blocked thousands of websites and blogs while abusive legal proceedings against online journalists persist,” Anonymous said in a statement on its Web site. “The government now wants to impose a new filtering system on the 22nd of August that will make it possible to keep records of all the people’s internet activity. Though it remains opaque why and how the system will be put in place, it is clear that the government is taking censorship to the next level.”
The loose-knit Anonymous group had planned to launch a distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the Turkish telecoms site beginning at 6 p.m. (1500 GMT) on Thursday as part of “Operation Turkey.”
“We will not stand back in the face of an attack on our country by this group,” Yavuz Kocoglu, head of an association set up to tackle IT crimes, said in a statement to Reuters. “We call on the state bodies responsible for fighting such crimes to act.”
There have been protests in Turkey ahead of national elections scheduled to take place in three days.
Other Anonymous targets have been Iran, Egypt , Sony and companies like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard after they stopped allowing Wikileaks to receive contributions through their sites.
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