Swedish websites down after Anonymous threats

IDG News Service - A handful of Swedish websites remained down Friday evening there after hacking group Anonymous threatened earlier this week to attack the nation for a police raid on a hosting service that was once home to The Pirate Bay.

As of 6:45 p.m. Swedish time Friday, the website of the Swedish Security Service was down, as well as Sweden.se and Studyinsweden.se, with the latter two sites apparently down for most of the week because of distributed denial-of-service attacks.

Other Swedish sites affected during the week, including those of the Swedish Prosecutors' Office and the Swedish Armed Forces, were operating Friday evening.

Anonymous, in a YouTube video Monday, condemned a Swedish police raid on hosting service PRQ.

"The raid on PRQ disabled many of our torrent sites," the video said. "We see this as a crime against freedom [of] information and therefore, we have disabled some of [the] Swedish government's or affiliate sites in protest against this raid."

The video listed 19 websites as targets, and five of those sites appeared to be down Friday evening. "Swedish Government: You know our capabilities and what we want," the video said. "The choice is yours."

Sweden.se on Friday had a message saying the site was down. One of the possible reasons, it said, was that the site "may be experiencing excessive load."

Grant Gross covers technology and telecom policy in the U.S. government for The IDG News Service. Follow Grant on Twitter at GrantGross. Grant's e-mail address is grant_gross@idg.com.