Anonymous Attacks Spanish Police Site In Response To Sony Arrests

The web site for Spain's national police force was briefly taken offline Sunday in an attack that hacking collective Anonymous claimed to be in response to the recent arrest of three citizens suspected in the attacks on Sony's network infrastructure. Spanish authorities confirmed to the BBC that the Policia.es site was down for about an hour Sunday night, but could not confirm the involvement of the Anonymous group. However, Anonymous news site AnonOps posted a press release purportedly from the group, claiming the attack and others like it were peaceful protests analogous to a real-world sit-in. "Arresting somebody for taking part in a DDoS attack is exactly like arresting somebody for attending a peaceful demonstration in their hometown," the release reads. "Anonymous believes this right to peacefully protest is one of the fundamental pillars of any democracy..." Anonymous first publicly threatened Sony's servers in early April, launching a brief denial-of-service attack in response to the company's legal case against alleged PlayStation 3 hacker George "GeoHot" Hotz. (The case was settled out of court about a week later.) When a massive server breach compromised Sony user data and knocked PSN offline later in April, Anonymous repeatedly denied involvement. However, Sony revealed in a May letter to Congress that a file named "Anonymous," which contained the group's "We are Legion" rallying cry, had been intrusively placed on their servers at some point. Membership and leadership are hard to identify in Anonymous' loose collective of hackers and web activists, with members often claiming the mantle of the entire group without any sort of official organizational support.