Big British government sites felled by Anonymous

“How dare a government do the things that a government always does!” is a rough paraphrase of the inevitable hacking group Anonymous, which has disabled several British government websites in a new wave of attacks that have disabled the British Home Office and 10 Downing Street. At issue appears to be the extradition of three hackers to the United States to stand trial. Anonymous announced the operation on Twitter on Saturday, giving the Home Office url for followers to attack and using the tag “#OpTrialAtHome”, which was first introduced last week. Last night, the command was given and hackers went to work launching a DDoS attack, which floods a site with artificially created traffic, knocking it offline.

Here’s what matters about this: Anonymous announced it, THEN pulled it off, AND it worked. So either the British government wasn’t paying attention or it got too overwhelmed to do anything about it. This means the government is ill-prepared or Anonymous is incredibly powerful.