The company's web pages were targeted by of a concerted attack on Monday and Tuesday. Two other major web sites, those of the telecommunications service provider Eniro, and the Suomi24 portal also reported similar attack.
Huhtakallio says that YLE plans to make a criminal complaint about the attack, but he is not optimistic that the perpetrators would be caught.
So far there is no indication of who might be behind the assault, but Mikko Hyppönen, CEO of the data security company F-Secure, says that an East European group had threatened to take such action earlier in the week. He says that the group might include Finnish members.
The assault on the web sites of YLE, the telecommunications service provider Eniro, and the Suomi24 portal is the most serious ever made against Finnish websites.
The problems began with YLE's website on Monday, and on Tuesday, Eniro and Suomi24 were hit in two waves. The first wave was routed through a Finnish server, and it was quickly repulsed. The second attack came simultaneously from several countries, including Norway, China, and the United States.
The Ministry of the Interior emphasises that its web pages and those of the Finnish police were not targets of any hostile action; the websites were down on Tuesday, but the reason for that was normal maintenance.
