"Attacks on Polish sites must stop now" says the Anonymous hacktivist collective. That statement was made in a posting on Pastebin and corroborated by a Twitter posting from a well known Anonymous Twitter account. The call comes after government web sites in Poland were paralysed by denial of service attacks, by a group claiming it is the Polish branch of Anonymous, as a protest against the Polish government's intention to join the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

The new Anonymous posting calls on those attacks to stop, saying that is is "not helping the fight against ACTA" and that, according to Polish NGOs, they are "compromising three years of hard work and harming their ability to negotiate". It also points out that Tusk, the Polish prime minister, considers the attacks, and threats to publish sensitive information on officials, as unacceptable blackmail. Now that the DDoS has brought attention to the issue, Anonymous says "it's time to stop and let the political process do its work".

Of a list of sites under attack provided by F-Secure, the majority, including arimr.gov.pl, ets.gov.pl, mf.gov.pl, mzios.gov.pl, pip.gov.pl, praca.gov.pl, premier.gov.pl, stat.gov.pl and uzp.gov.pl, were not still not responding at the time of writing.

(djwm)