The Greater Manchester police website has been taken down by what appears to be a denial of service (DOS) attack, with a Twitter account in Lithuania claiming responsibility.
Users were unable to access the site www.gmp.police.uk from around 8pm, but the force restored it shortly afterwards. A tweet from Greater Manchester police (GMP) said that there had been some “technical issues” that had now been resolved.
However, a short time later, the website went down again. An anonymous Twitter account holder called @n0w1337 tweeted the force, claiming they had taken the site down and demanding that GMP acknowledge it was an attack rather than an IT failure.
@gmpolice @sky1 your site is offline and we are responsible http://t.co/balqDvGZUX @n0w1337
— Prince (@g0d1337) September 2, 2015
The account holder, who says they were tweeting from Lithuania, said: “Disclose out there that I was the one who knocked your site or I will not stop here.”
The same account holder has also tweeted that they have taken down the websites of Manchester city council and Manchester airport, but both websites are currently accessible. GMP’s site was still inaccessible late on Wednesday night.
Deputy Chief Constable Ian Hopkins of GMP said: “We are treating this as a denial of service attack, which is a malicious attempt to disrupt services. I want to reassure people that the server for the website is not connected to any other force system and that the information contained on the website is all public information.
“We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused to members of the public and we are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”
A denial of service attack works by making large numbers of computers access a website at the same time in order to overload it and force it offline.
