The public-facing website for the UK’s National Crime Agency has wobbled today under a Distributed Denial of Service Attack.
The NCA – dubbed Britain’s FBI – told The Register its site was “an attractive target” and that “attacks on it are a fact of life.”
A spokesperson dismissed the skiddies’ tool of choice, and branded DDoS a “blunt form of attack which takes volume and not skill. It isn’t a security breach, and it doesn’t affect our operational capability.”
“At worst it is a temporary inconvenience to users of our website,” added the agency.
DDoS prevention services are widely available, but the NCA told us that it had “a duty to balance the value of keeping our website accessible with the cost of doing so, especially in the face of a threat which can scale up endlessly.”
“The measures we have in place at present mean that our site is generally up and running again within 30 minutes, and we think that’s proportionate,” the agency concluded. ®
