ICO Struggles To Get Website Back Online After ‘Bot Attack’

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is struggling to get its website back online after what is believed to have been a lengthy distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

The ICO has been targeted by the ATeam, an Anonymous splinter group, since Sunday when it first suffered disruption to its website. The site was then inaccessible for approximately 24 hours, from yesterday afternoon to 2pm today. For a brief period, the website was back online today, but now it was down again at the time of publication.

The ATeam, which said it had carried out the DDoS hit with a “bot attack”, has also taken responsibility for downing the website of home secretary Theresa May, an outage that lasted from Sunday night to Monday morning.

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“Access to the ICO website has been disrupted over the past few days. We believe this is due to a distributed denial of service attack,” an ICO spokesperson told TechWeekEurope.

“The website itself has not been damaged, but people are unable to access it. We provide a public facing website which contains no sensitive information.”

“We regret this disruption to our service and we are working to try to bring the website back online as soon as possible.”

The ATeam told TechWeekEurope it had targeted the ICO as part of a protest against the Leveson Inquiry, claiming the information commissioner had not been tough enough on media organisations over hacking.

“The information commissioner has failed to address the multiple data protection breaches of citizens by the media,” the spokesperson for the group, who calls himself Winston Smith, said. “The ICO are not equipped, nor have the motivation to ensure that we are protected.”

Many users have noticed that The Leveson Inquiry website was also down yesterday, with the ATeam taking credit for a hit. However, a spokesperson for the Leveson Inquiry said it was an internal issue.

“We had a technical problem with one of the servers for our website. It was internal as far as we know, and nothing to do with an external event,” he said.

“Our technical people tell us that it was. We use more than one server for the site, hence the ability (for some) to continue using it. One sever had a glitch.”

“It was still possible for some visitors to see the site so it was never completely closed.”

As noted in TechWeekEurope’s exclusive on the Theresa May website DDoS, and in a follow up interview on Anonymous “destroying itself”, the ATeam has numerous plans for future campaigns. The group hopes to take down more websites, including those of the Leveson Inquiry, the Home Office and the Supreme Court. It has already taken credit for taking down the website of the latter at the weekend, although the Supreme Court did not believe its outage was due to a DDoS attack.

At the same time, the ATeam is hoping to stop what it calls “black hat grooming of children within Anonymous.”

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