UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency website shut down by cyber attack

London, May 4 (ANI): UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency's (SOCA) website had to be shut down after it fell victim to a cyber attack for the second time in less than a year.

The attack comes in less than a week after SOCA led an international operation to shut down dozens of websites where criminal hackers trade credit card numbers and other stolen personal data, reports The Telegraph.

SOCA said it shut down its website to minimise the impact of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack on other websites hosted by the same provider.

A SOCA spokesman could not say when it would be restored. He said no sensitive information could be accessed by attacking the SOCA website because it is not connected to internal systems.

Web address records suggest the SOCA website relies on servers operated by Claranet, a London-based internet provider.

It is the second time in less than a year that the SOCA website has been forced offline by DDoS attacks, which cripple servers by bombarding them thousands of requests for data.

The SOCA website was forced offline in June last year by LulzSec, a hacking group that targeted law enforcement agencies for fun. British members of the group are awaiting trial for the attack.

Some commentators cast DDoS attacks as a digital "sit-in" protest, but they are punishable with 10 years imprisonment under the Computer Misuse Act.

Along with hobbyist hackers, SOCA is an enemy of professional cyber criminals who control networks of millions of hijacked computers capable of mounting DDoS attacks. (ANI)