The National Police website was briefly knocked offline by the hacker collective Anonymous in retaliation for the arrest of three Spanish men the police claimed were ‘core’ members of the group.
The hackers managed to keep www.policia.es offline for about an hour from 22:30 on Sunday June 12th.
The group said Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a legitimate form of peaceful protest and some of its members are thought to have carried out similar attacks on Turkish government websites to protest against net censorship.
Anonymous also denied that the men arrested in Spain were part of the ‘core’ of Spanish members of the group as they say they don’t have a core group.