Falklands Counter Strike: British hackers attack Argentinian developer's website

Dattatec.com reports distributed denial of service attacks

The website for the Malvinas version of Counter Strike (Getty Images)

The Falklands/Malvinas dispute moved into cyberspace this week, as British hackers attacked an Argentine game in which the country's police fight to reclaim the territory from British "terrorists".

Dattatec.com launched the version, or map, for the online first-person shooter game Counter Strike this week.

Its intro reads: "In 1982, Argentines fought the English to recover the sovereignty of their Malvinas islands," with the company saying it left Union flags off the map "out of respect to the honour and glory of those who fell in the Malvinas".

And now Fernando Llorente, a spokesman for the company, has revealed: "Two of our websites were attacked using DDoS (distributed denial of service) during the day, with hackers trying to saturate our server's connection."

A DDoS attack involves a programme repeatedly trying to access a website, to make it unavailable to its intended users.

"The attack," Llorente continued, "was 5 Gbps in strength - the equivalent of 5,000 PCs connecting to the sites at the same time every second - but our technical team was able to block it effectively.

"Generally these attacks come from eastern Europe and China, but we detected that most, although not all, of the IP addresses used this time were from the UK.

"At Dattatec we habitually receive different scopes of attack - this is the first one that has come mainly from the UK, although I cannot affirm that it was a case of cyber warfare.

"We think diplomacy should prevail between Argentina and the UK and we do not fear another attack - when someone tries to hit a server and is blocked, they do not try again."

Counter Strike features two opposing groups of players, with one side playing police and the other terrorists.

Mr Llorente said the game had been downloaded by 15,000 users since its Monday launch.

An estimated 650 Argentines, 255 British servicemen and three islanders died in the 1982 conflict.

Recently Argentina's President Cristina Kirchner has said the Falklands, or Malvinas in Spanish, should be given back to her country, but a plebiscite on the tiny islands confirmed the people there wanted to remain British.