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October 05, 2012

Swedish Government Sites Hit by Anonymous Hackers

By Oliver VanDervoort, Contributing Writer

There is very little doubt that hackerstoday are becoming an even bigger nuisance than ever before. These days, hackergroups in particular are finding it extremely worthwhile to cause problems whenever they can both for businesses and for government entities. The latest victim of these groups appears to be the Swedish government who saw a wide range of sites get knocked offline, including the nation’s central bank website and two government affiliate sites.



The latest hacker attacks, announced earlier by Anonymous, led to anger aimed at the Swedish government for launching a raid against an Internet company that had been supporting the illegal file sharing website Pirate Bay. Before the attack, the company put together a YouTube (News - Alert) video that there would be repercussions if the raid happened. 

"We see this as a crime against freedom of information," a narrator on the video said. "Swedish government will know our capabilities and what we want." Sweden’s Court Administrations website was hit with a DDoS attack and there were apparently foul messages left on another government website. While the attack left those sites damaged for a short time, Sweden’s government says that the sites were back on and back to business in a matter of hours.


Image via Shutterstock

The raids by police of PeriQ Networks AB in Solna, which just outside Stockholm, Sweden, are what angered Anonymous. PeriQ is connected to Pirate Bay because two of the illegal file sharing’s site owners started that company. During the raid, police apparently seized several servers that were at the PeriQ headquarters.

After the raid, the company issued a statement that most likely led to the hacking in which they blamed the police’s “methods” for several websites the company hosts as the reason for longer than usual downtimes. While Swedish prosecutors do not believe that anyone at PeriQ was responsible for criminal activity, it appears the servers were taken because they may have hosted copyrighted materials.




Edited by Allison Boccamazzo
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