Information Commissioner's Office website blocked by 'hackers'

The website of the UK's data protection watchdog has been blocked in an apparent attack by hackers.

Access to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) online service has been disrupted for several days in what it believes is a deliberate act.

Messages on Twitter claimed the attack had been carried out by Anonymous, a loosely-organised group of hackers which has regularly targeted official websites.

An ICO spokesman said the site contained no sensitive data.

"Access to the ICO website has been disrupted over the past few days. We believe this is due to a distributed denial of service attack," he said.

"The website itself has not been damaged, but people have been unable to access it. We provide a public-facing website which contains no sensitive information.

"We regret this disruption to our service and we are working to try to bring the website back online as soon as possible."

The website of the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics also suffered access problems yesterday but a spokesman said they did not appear to have been caused by hacking.

Initial investigations suggested an internal server problem was to blame for some users being unable to use the site, he said.

PA