STOCK­HOLM-A group linked to the hack­er net­work Anony­mous yes­ter­day said it had at­tacked the Swedish gov­ern­ment's Web site, bring­ing it down for pe­ri­ods of time by over­load­ing it with traf­fic. Cy­ber­Force used Twit­ter to claim re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, say­ing, "We have suc­ceed­ed in the at­tack against the gov­ern­ment." It al­so in­di­cat­ed it may launch more at­tacks at around mid­night yes­ter­day, say­ing, "this op starts at 24.00," but it was not im­me­di­ate­ly clear who the tar­gets for those at­tacks may be. The group said it had used a de­nial of ser­vice at­tack against the gov­ern­ment, which es­sen­tial­ly swamps a Web site with false users. Gov­ern­ment spokesman Ja­cob Lager­cranser con­firmed the Web site-used by all de­part­ments of Swe­den's gov­ern­ment-had ex­pe­ri­enced some prob­lems, but he de­clined to give fur­ther de­tails, say­ing the gov­ern­ment nev­er com­ments on se­cu­ri­ty is­sues.

"Pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly we've ex­pe­ri­enced some prob­lems in get­ting in on it. We're work­ing on the prob­lems," he said. The site was up and run­ning again late yes­ter­day. Cy­ber­Force de­scribes it­self as part of the hack­ing col­lec­tive Anony­mous, which drew in­ter­na­tion­al at­ten­tion by hack­ing on­to a pri­vate con­fer­ence call by the FBI and Britain's Scot­land Yard, then pub­lish­ing the rough­ly 15-minute-long record­ing of the call on the In­ter­net on Fri­day. In the past week, Sabo­teurs have stolen pass­words and sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion on tip­sters while hack­ing in­to the Web sites of sev­er­al law en­force­ment agen­cies world­wide.

The al­leged Swedish at­tack, launched at around mid­day lo­cal time, co­in­cid­ed with protests in Stock­holm and Swe­den's sec­ond largest city Gote­borg, demon­strat­ing against the An­ti-Coun­ter­feit­ing Trade Agree­ment, or AC­TA. In a tweet, Cy­ber­Force sug­gest­ed the at­tack could be linked to those protests say­ing, "We're not protest­ing on the (street), we're protest­ing on the In­ter­net." AC­TA is a far-reach­ing agree­ment that aims to har­monise in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards on pro­tect­ing the rights of those who pro­duce mu­sic, movies, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, fash­ion, and a range of oth­er prod­ucts that of­ten fall vic­tim to in­tel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty theft.

AP