The web site of Spain’s federal police was hit by the hacking group Anonymous on Sunday, forcing it offline for about an hour.

The distributed denial of service attack against www.policia.es, Anonymous said, was in retaliation for the Spanish government’s arrest of three Anonymous members accused of participating in a string of web bombardments that took down sites across the globe.

“The attack is a direct response to the Friday arrests of three individuals alleged to be associated with acts of cyber civil disobedience attributed to Anonymous,” the group said in a statement.

The police said the three, whose identities were not disclosed, carried out the attacks from a server based in one of the suspect’s houses in northern Spain. The Spanish police said that Anonymous was responsible for attacks on Sony, government sites in Algeria, Iran, Egypt and Libya, in addition to two Spanish banks and an Italian energy concern.

The Spanish police said it was investigating the outage of its site.

Anonymous has publicly taken credit for attacks against PayPal, Visa and others because those institutions declined to transmit donations to the whistleblower site, WikiLeaks. It also declared Sony a target to protest the Japanese media concern’s lawsuit against PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz.

The police originally said Friday the arrests were in connection to the hack of Sony’s PlayStation Network, which forced the company to shutter its online gaming service for more than a month. But Reuters said the arrests were not related to the PlayStation intrusion, but allegedly involved other attacks on “some Sony websites.”

Anonyous has denied involvement in the PlayStation attack.

Sony Chairman Howard Stringer said Anonymous had attacked the websites of several Sony divisions. Another hacking collective, LulzSec, has taken responsibility for penetrating servers at Sony Pictures and Sony BMG.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

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