It comes in less than a week after the agency led an international operation to shut down dozens of websites where criminal hackers traded credit card numbers and other stolen personal data.
Soca said it shut down its website at 10pm on Wednesday to minimise the impact of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack on other websites hosted by the same provider. It remained unavailable at lunchtime on Thursday and a spokesman could not say when it would be restored.
Web address records suggest the Soca website relies on servers operated by Claranet, a London-based internet provider.
The spokesman emphasised that no sensitive information could be accessed by attacking the Soca website because it is not connected to internal systems.
It is the second time in less than a year that the Soca website has been forced offline by DDoS attacks, which cripple servers by bombarding them thousands of requests for data. Some commentators cast DDoS attacks as a digital “sit-in” protest, but they are punishable with 10 years imprisonment under the Computer Misuse Act.
In June last year Soca was forced offline by LulzSec, a hacking group that targeted law enforcement agencies for fun. British members of the group are awaiting trial for the attack.
The agency’s spokesman declined to comment on the source of the latest attack and unlike the Lulzsec attack nobody immediately claimed credit. As well as hobbyist hackers, Soca is an enemy of professional cyber criminals who control networks of millions of hijacked computers capable of mounting DDoS attacks.
Last Friday it announced it had recovered 2.5 million items of personal information and arrested two men when it shut down 36 online black markets for stolen data.
