In the past week, hundreds of Danish newspapers, blogs and other websites have been hit by hackers. Most of these attacks were Denial of Service attacks, which are easily done by sending a flood of traffic against a website. In other attacks, hackers defaced the websites to show anti-Danish messages including calls for boycotts and violence.
These attacks come after Muslims denounced newspapers from several European countries, Denmark in particular, for printing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad. Zone-H, an Internet security website, said it has been tracking the affected websites and currently has a list of almost 1000 sites.
Politically oriented website defacements have been happening for several years. Back in 2003, hundreds of websites were defaced leading up to the Iraq conflict. The ongoing tensions between Pakistan and India have also spawned website attacks by both sides.
The Jyllands-Posten newspaper site, the newspaper that originally printed the cartoons, has not yet been successfully hacked.
