BOGOTA Ecuador — President Rafael Correa was about to launch into his state of the union address when the presidential website came under attack. As thousands of people were logging on to watch his speech streamed live, the site went down for more than two hours.

It was Aug. 10 and it was the first time Ecuador’s government had been attacked by Anonymous, the online hacker collective, police said.

Cyber-crime has been prevalent in Latin America since the dawn of online transactions. But many nations are struggling with a new threat: politically-motivated hackers.

As computers and the Internet have become more prevalent in the region, homegrown cyber-activists are taking cues from groups in Europe and the United States, analysts said.

Just this year, groups claiming to be affiliates of Anonymous — perhaps the largest and most well-known hacker group — have sprung up in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Brazilian government websites have been attacked more than 1,250 times this year, according to Zone-H, which tracks hacker activity. In Colombia, hackers recently brought down sites for the ministry of education, the senate, the presidency and President Juan Manuel Santos’ personal webpage. Chile has seen waves of cyber attacks as part of Anonymous’ “BadEducation” campaign in support of student protestors.

“We thought these kind of things only happened in large countries,” said Jose Luis Chávez, a computer engineer who advises the government of Guatemala on cyber security. In August, Anonymous threatened to take down that nation’s government websites.

It was a bluff. But the day before the expected attack, several Guatemalan news outlets were knocked offline, Chávez said.

“There was no real knowledge of how these attacks worked,” he said. While computer experts have read about them happening in the United States or Europe, Chávez said, “We’d never lived them in the flesh.”

Using chat rooms, Twitter and other social media sites, groups like Anonymous direct their followers and harness infected computers to overwhelm websites with traffic. It was one of these denial-of-service, or DoS, attacks that took Correa’s speech offline.

Other hackers break into sites to steal information or alter them — sometimes with a political purpose but often just to demonstrate their skills. Of the 1.4 million website attacks that Zone-H recorded in 2010, 8 percent were politically motivated.

Gordon Duguid, the executive secretary of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism at the Organization of American States, said it’s impossible to get an accurate reading on cyber attacks in the region.

“Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests a trend of increasing attacks targeting government information systems and networks,” he said. As Internet usage in Central and South America has spiked more than 1,000 percent over the last decade, Duguid said, “the number of individuals in the region with the desire and wherewithal to seek to disrupt or penetrate government information systems and networks has also increased.”

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is opening the London Conference on Cyberspace, a global gathering that will look at how nations can cooperate to fight online criminal networks.