Hackers attacked the website of Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), a spokesman said on Thursday, the latest in a wave of assaults against high profile targets like NASA, the Vatican and multi-national companies. Internet activist groups such as Anonymous, LulzSec and Antisec have previously been linked to attacks against bodies including the U.S. Senate, Sony and Visa.

 A SOCA spokesman said that no confidential information had been lost during the incident, known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, where a website's host computers are bombarded with requests for information, making them crash. "We elected to take our website offline at 10 p.m. last night. That action was taken to limit the impact of the DDoS attack on other clients hosted by our server," he said.

The agency, which investigates serious crimes like people smuggling, drug trafficking and shootings, last month shut down 36 web domains being used to sell stolen credit card data. It has been a victim of cyber attacks before. In February, members of Anonymous published a recording of a phone call between FBI agents and London detectives in which they talked about their plans to tackle hacking.