Anonymous attacks ICO and Leveson Inquiry websites

A group claiming affiliation with the hacktivist collective says attacks are in protest at the 'corruption within the inquiry'

A group claiming affiliation with hacktivist collective Anonymous has said that it is behind today's attacks on the websites of both the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and the Leveson Inquiry.

In common with many attacks purportedly from Anonymous members, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) approach has been used to effectively force the target sites offline.

A Tumblr page belonging to "Anon ATeam", using language characteristic of Anonymous members, has described the attack as OpLeveson.

"The Leveson inquiry has become a farce, with the Lord Justice Leveson reporting to a member of cabinet Jeremy Hunt who has already been identified as having engaged in malfeasance in office via fraudulent release of data to Newscorp," the group claimed on the site.

The group also expressed its dissatisfaction at the way the ICO conducts itself, and the level of protection provided to private data in the UK.

"80 per cent of Data Protection breaches crime in the UK are committed by the UK civil service and yet not properly investigated," claimed the site.

"[The] Information Commissioner lacks independence [and] has repeatedly failed to protect the public's privacy from hacking or data protection breaches," it added.

A Twitter account calling itself 'UKAnonymous2012' informed the wider world of the attacks late last night and this morning, repeatedly tweeting:

"#TANGODOWN @ http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk & http://ico.gov.uk"

However, Twitter accounts belonging to more regular and longer standing Anonymous members have so far said nothing about the attacks.

Anonymous is a loose affiliation that enforces no real membership policy.

At the time of writing, the Leveson Inquiry website was available, but the ICO's pages were still offline.