WikiLeaks supporters hack Swedish government websites

The hacked websites include the Swedish Armed Forces, Sweden.se and the Swedish Institute.

Several Swedish government websites have been hacked and jammed by some supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with some of them claiming responsibility for this on Twitter.

The hacked websites include the Swedish Armed Forces, Sweden.se, the Swedish Institute, and the Swedish Courts.

The service provider for the Swedish Institute said that the attack is a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which caused the site to collapse from too many requests.

A government spokeswoman Anna Dahlen was quoted by AFP saying that, "I can confirm that the government site had problems today, but for security reasons, I cannot say more."

Swedish Armed Forces head of digital media Niklas Englund said that it was unclear who was behind the so-called DDoS attacks, in which websites are overwhelmed with bogus traffic.

Englund noted that an unidentified group urging Sweden to take its "hands off Assange" claimed responsibility on Twitter.

The latest attack is the second attack on government web sites in Assange's support in the last two weeks.

Last week, a UK's Hertfordshire Police website had been hacked by a supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who posted login details, passwords, phone numbers and IP addresses of officers online.

In August 2102, WikiLeaks was back online following a week of downtime caused by a prolonged DDoS attack.

Currently Assange has taken shelter in Ecuadorian embassy in London since June 19 to avoid extradition to Sweden.