LulzSec claims responsibility for CIA.gov outage

Website goes down briefly

By Dan Goodin, 16th June 2011

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LulzSec, the hacking and prankster collective that has attacked the US Senate, Sony, and the Fox and PBS television networks, has struck again, claiming it was behind an assault that took down the website for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Attempts to access cia.gov on Wednesday afternoon were met with only limited success. LulzSec claimed responsibility for the brief and only partial outage, writing in a Twitter post: "Tango down - cia.gov - for the lulz."

The website contains no classified material, but bringing down the public portal of one of the world's most powerful government agencies would nonetheless be LulzSec's most brazen prank to date. There was no way to independently verify the group's claim of responsibility.

A CIA spokeswoman told the Associated Press that officials are investigating the reports. Such outages are often the result of DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks. The assaults generally require little skill to carry out. ®

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Highly Rated

Posted Thursday 16th June 2011 04:58 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Who gains?

Consider this - a group springs from nowhere in a short time and starts attacking prominent government and corporate sites and is given wide publicity.

Then the backlash and the crackdown begins - "hacker" becomes as dirty word as "paedophile" and extra-legal action is taken against anyone on the pretext of painting that label on them.

I'll predict that you'll find that, when the dust settles, Lulz are actually covert agents of the Statsi State rather than the enemies of it they appear to be.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Posted Thursday 16th June 2011 04:31 GMT

Turtle