1 December 2010Patents

Cyber strike forces UK IPO website offline

A cyber attack forced the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to temporarily shut down its website.

Online services, including those that allow patent and trademark applications to be filed, were inaccessible over the weekend of October 16.

Matt Navarra, an IPO spokesperson, said: “The IPO chose to disconnect its website from the Internet following a co-ordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on October 16 at around 18:00 BST.”

The website operated a limited service on October 18 and 19. The IPO resumed several of the trademark, patent and design search facilities on October 20, but online filing was not possible until October 21, when a full service was resumed.

‘Operation: Payback’, a campaign of action designed to disrupt anti-piracy groups, is believed to be responsible for the DDoS attack. A website linked to the campaign lists the time and date of the attack on its ‘Targets’ page.

According to the website, the attacks are “not the actions of a group of rebellious vandals, but organised protests against the reign of extreme pro-copyright organisations and watchdogs for the entertainment industries”.

The IPO’s website is now fully operational. Customers can access all of the IPO’s external web services, including application forms and search services.

Navarro said: “As part of our standard network security procedures, our main services were protected prior to the attack. The website and our internal services suffered no harm.”

Cyber terrorism was dubbed a tier-one threat by the UK government in a recent report on national security strategy. The report describes “hostile attacks upon UK cyber space by other states and large-scale cyber crime” as a risk of the “highest priority”.

Organisers of ‘Operation: Payback’ collectively refer to themselves as ‘anonymous’ and are thought to co-ordinate attacks through 4chan, a popular Internet forum that enables users to post messages—that are not moderated or filtered by the website—on its ‘Random’, or ‘/b/’, messageboard.

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