Spanish Police Website Hacked By ‘Anonymous’

Spanish authorities have confirmed that the website of the Spanish police force was knocked offline by the “Anonymous” group of hackers over the weekend, following the arrest of three alleged members of the group on Friday.

The www.policia.es website went offline “for a few minutes” on Sunday at around 2 am local time on Sunday morning, but the site recovered shortly afterwards, a spokesman for the Spanish police told the Wall Street Journal.

‘Peaceful protest’

By contrast, a statement issued by Anonymous on a website connected with the group claimed that the site had been taken out of commission “for hours” on Saturday.

The group claimed to have carried out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the site as “an act of peaceful protest” following the arrest of the three individuals on Friday.

“You have not detained three participants of Anonymous,” the group said in its statement. “We have no members and we are not a group of any kind. You have, however, detained three civilians expressing themselves… Anonymous believes this right to peacefully protest is one of the fundamental pillars of any democracy.”

Authorities believe the trio arrested took part in a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a Sony PlayStation store and government websites in Algeria, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Libya and New Zealand, Spain’s national police said in a statement on June 10. The three men also allegedly attacked Spanish government, law enforcement, banking and media sites.

According to the police, they are not suspected of having taken part in the attack on Sony’s PlayStation Network in April that compromised over 101 million user accounts, or in the DDoS attacks that preceded the massive data breach. Anonymous has already denied involvement but has acknowledged that individual members could have taken part independently.