Denial of service attacks have earlier been used as protest forms (more here .pdf). Yesterday the Swedish government website was the target of such an attack. The attack claimed to be a protest against the actions of the Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström for being the minister who has introduced the most amount of repressive legislation in the shortest time (see earlier posts here and here)
The attack was sparked by actions by the Police on the request of the minister to shut down the bittorrent site The Pirate Bay. During the raid several organisations not connected with torrent sharing were closed down and the legal representative of the Pirate Bay was required to leave a DNA sample (see more here). The Pirate Bay was offline for less than five days and yesterday protests were held in both Stockholm and Göteborg.
While not seen as part of the formal/official protests DoS attacks have targed the Swedish Police website and the website of the Swedish Government. For a while a message to Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström was up on a site connected with the attack: “Thomas – we want our freedom back”. Aftonbladet has the screenshot here.
(via Media Culpa)