Two distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks have rendered the website of the Swedish police and many others inaccessible for several hours. The results of the preliminary investigation suggest that the platform of a media IT development company was specifically targeted.

The first attack started on Thursday morning and seriously affected the network of a hosting provider called Basefarm. The intended target was a web development company called Adeprimo, owning and serving the biggest group of daily newspapers in Sweden.

"Under normal conditions a relatively high-traffic website receives about 800 requests per second. During the attack against Adeprimo we registered up to 400,000 requests per second. As a consequence part of Basefarm's network infrastructure went down and the required traffic for a number of our customers didn't get through," Sara Murby Forste, Basefarm's managing director, explained.

The company managed to limit collateral damage rather quickly, but around forty sites depending on Adeprimo's platform remained offline until noon. These included the websites of many local newspapers published by the Stampen Group, Eskilstuna Group, Nya Lidkopings Tidning, and the Mittmedia Group.

Basefarm's technical manager Stefan Mansby noted that the malicious traffic originated from IP addresses outside the European Union. Asia and the United States were pointed out as sources, but because such attacks are usually performed through compromised computers, this is by no means an indication of the perpetrators' real location.

A second attack occurred during the afternoon and took polisen.se, the website of the Swedish police, offline. Investigators believe that the two incidents are related. "I don't think it's a coincidence. The amount of traffic was exactly the same in both attacks and we too witnessed traffic from the United States. But the saboteur could be anywhere in the world," Ann-Marie Alveras, head of the national police's web security division, commented for The Local.

At the moment, there is no clear indication as to what the reason for the attacks might be. There were no threats made in advance and no demands thereafter. Ms. Alveras speculates that they might have simply had the purpose of attracting attention.