Cyber-terrorists take to the internet

Politically motivated hacking is on the increase as anti-capitalist and anti-war protestors take to the web.

UK government websites have experienced a 378 per cent increase in defacements in the past year. Over the past 12 months the dot-gov-dot-uk domain name was hacked 43 times compared to just nine in 2000.

Also under fire were dot-org-dot-uk and dot-co-dot-uk, which experienced 25 and 385 hacks respectively.

Organisations with a global dot-com domain name failed to escape the political protestors. Around 30 per cent of the global 30,388 web defacements were aimed at a dot-com organisation, according to authors of the report Mi2G.

In the wake of the US-China spy plane incident, attacks on China's dot-cn domain surged to 1,298 from last year's total of 91.

The Middle East was also rife with hacks as the Palestinian Intifada sympathisers from predominantly Islamic countries continued to attack Israeli domains.