In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon central Finland police said that they had held two men from the Tampere region and another from Uusimaa on suspicion of engineering cyber attacks on government websites.
All of the men were under the age of 20. One of the suspects was detained while two others were imprisoned. All three are suspected of aggravated disruption of IT systems, police said.
The attacks were deemed to be denial of service attacks and took place between February 9 and March 23. Police said that their investigations were conducted in collaboration with the National Bureau of Investigation’s anti-cybercrime unit and the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority’s cyber security centres.
Many ministry websites targeted
The disruptions lasted from a few hours to a few days, but did not compromise the organisations’ IT systems, police said.
A denial of service attack essentially floods an organisation’s servers with so much traffic that legitimate users either experience delays using the service, or are altogether unable to access it.
Earlier this year the ministries of Defence, Finance, Social Affairs and Health, Agriculture and Forestry and the Prime Minister’s office as well as the Financial Supervisory Authority all reported website disruptions.