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The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has seen its website taken offline thanks to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which the Anonymous splinter group the ATeam has taken credit for.

The ATeam said the hit was in retaliation against a Channel 4 ‘​Dispatch​es’​ report, which discovered almost 1,000 DWP staff were disciplined over a 10-month period from April 2011 to January 2012 for unlawfully or inappropriately accessing social security records. Additionally, the Department of Health admitted there had been 158 reported incidents of unlawful access to medical records throughout last year.

The site was disrupted today and occasionally completely down. “​There was some disruption to the website that we have been investigating and working on,”​ a DWP spokesperson said. “​But for the majority of people the website has been working and continues to work normally.”​
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