By Shaun Nichols in San Francisco
V3.co.uk
31 Oct 2009
A denial of service attack crippled the web site for Sweden's police administration earlier this week.
The attacks flooded the site with information requests, causing the servers to crash and take the site offline. According to Swedish news site The Local, at its peak the attack caused traffic to spike from 800 requests per second to more than 400,000 requests per second.
In addition to crippling the police site, the attack also took down as many as 40 media sites also being hosted by service provider Basefarm.
The Local reported that as of Friday evening Swedish time, neither the hosting firm nor police investigators knew who was behind the attacks or their motive for taking the sites down.
In recent years, distributed denial of service attacks have grown increasingly popular as a form of both protest and cyber warfare.
Multiple computers and botnets are used to flood sites with traffic, causing servers to down and taking sites offline for extended periods of time.
