The Website of the United Kingdom’s Serious Online Crime Agency (SOCA) remains offline this morning following a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
A spokesperson from SOCA told the BBC that they took their website offline at 22:30 GMT on Wednesday but insisted that the outage did not present any real security risk to the organization.
“DDoS attacks are a temporary inconvenience to website visitors but do not pose a security risk,” the spokesperson said. “SOCA’s website contains only publicly available information and does not provide access to operational material.”
SOCA did not confirm the source or motive of the attack, but the BBC reports that SOCA recently shut down 36 websites that were allegedly involved in the sale of stolen credit card information.
That operation was carried out in concert with the FBI, and reportedly prevented an estimated £500 million ($809 million)in potential fraud.
This isn’t the first time SOCA has been targeted by DDoS. The BBC claims that the site went offline briefly in June 2011 following the arrest of suspected LulzSec hacker, Ryan Cleary.
