Recent denial of service attacks on the websites of the Information Commissioner and the Leveson inquiry were in protest of their failure to address press hacking in the UK, a group affiliated with Anonymous has claimed.

Yesterday, the ICO confirmed that its website has been subjected to a suspected DDoS attack in the last few days. “Access to the ICO website has been disrupted over the past few days,” the ICO said in a statement. “We believe this is due to a distributed denial of service attack.

“The website itself has not been damaged, but people are unable to access it,” it said. “We provide a public facing website which contains no sensitive information.”

It has also been reported that the website of the Leveson inquiry into press practices was also attacked.

in a post entitled #OpLeveson, a group calling itself Anonymous Team said that the attacks were in protest of the Leveson enquiry’s failure to prosecute members of the press accused of hacking, and the ICO’s failure to crack down on personal data ‘blagging’ by journalists.

“The Leveson inquiry has become a farce,” Anonymous Team wrote on its Tumblr page. “The Information Commissioner lacks independence [and] has repeatedly failed to protect public’s privacy from hacking or data protection breaches.”

“Anonymous refuses to sit by and watch this enquiry allow members of this government to commit serious crimes and for that injustice to go unpunished, for the citizens of the UK to be denied their Human Right to confidentiality

“Today’s protests were about the failure of the Leveson enquiry and how this theatre has turned into a sham of justice,” a spokesperson calling himself Winston Smith said in an online broadcast last night. “If we had a criminal investigation we could have had hundreds of prosecutions by now.”

The spokesperson made particular reference to invasions of privacy by the press. “We have no privacy any more”, he said.