Sweden’s SIGINT Agency Hit by DDoS

This was written by Michael Cheek on Thursday, November 5, 2009, 14:09.

Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA), the SIGINT Agency in Sweden, was subjected to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that lasted from Monday to Thursday according to agency officials. In a statement released by the agency, FRA officials said that the attack did not hamper their ability to conduct their operations.

The website, FRA.se, was subjected to the attack Monday evening and was eventually resolved on Thursday morning. Earlier this year, the Swedish parliament passed a law allowing the FRA to monitor all traffic that passed through networks in Sweden. It is presently unclear who was behind the attacks. However, the Finnish research organization F-Secure has pointed out that the majority of internet traffic from Russia passes through Sweden. Last week, a number of websites in Sweden were subjected to a mass DDoS attack. A DDoS attack involves a number of ‘bot’ computers that flood traffic to a site, overwhelming the websites capacity to respond to information requests.