The Italian cell of Anonymous hacker group has pledged to attack the official website of the Italian government.

With a statement posted on Twitter, Anonymous Italy launched #OperationItaly, which should target www.governo.it .

"One year on from the last attack against the government, we are back," reads the statement. "In ancient Greece it was called 'Democracy'. For years we've been told we were living in a democratic state. The invasive powers of media make us slaves and plagiarize our families. The global crisis continues and with it the concerns of the Italian people."

According to Anonymous, the attack will be a protest at the Italian state's growing military expenditure.

"In the last couple of years, to deal with the crisis, the different governments have scrapped funds to some Ministers, such as the Ministry of Instruction, while leaving funds to the Ministry of Defense untouched," reads the statement.

Anonymous Italy called on other anons to help them doing a "distributed denial of service" against the official website of the government. DDos assaults are a form of cyber-attack that use large numbers of computers to overload a website with requests, forcing it go offline.

The same strategy was used against Turkey's government owned websites last year. On that occasion, Turkish National Police arrested 32 suspected Anon during raids across 12 of the country's cities.

Last year, Italian police detained 25 suspected member of Anonymous after its online sabotage against governmental websites, like the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, and large companies' sites like state-owned oil major ENI.

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