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Hacking group LulzSec says it takes out CIA website
Hacking collective LulzSec has struck its biggest target yet — the Central Intelligence Agency.
The loose-knit organization claimed via its Twitter feed that it was responsible for the outage of the CIA.gov website for awhile Wednesday during the early evening hours ET. The website is now back online.
A visit to the site of the CIA's public website earlier confirmed that it was, indeed, offline, and a CIA spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said the agency is looking into what happened.
LulzSec announced what is likely a DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack shortly before 6 p.m. East Coast time.
"Tango down," the group Tweeted, pointing to www.cia.gov.
The website does not include classified data and has no impact on the CIA's operation, the Associated Press reported.
Wednesday's action follows weeks of attacks by the group that have taken out multiple gaming websites as well as an FBI website, a porn site and a Senate website. In fact, LulzSec appeared to have broken into the Senate website for a second time on Wednesday, though it's thought they did not take any sensitive data. In the case of the porn site, LulzSec published the login and passwords for nearly 26,000 users.
After claiming responsiblity for the CIA website outage, LulzSec continued to taunt those it had wreaked havoc on with this tweet: "Lulz Security, where the entertainment is always at your expense, whether you realize it or not. Wrecking your infrastructures since 2011."
For more LulzSec news, please see:
- Nerd fight! 4chan takes on LulzSec over game attacks
- Hackers again break into U.S. Senate website
- Bethesda is latest game company hit by hackers
- LulzSec goes on hacking rampage against game sites
Winda Benedetti writes about games and other things for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets right here on Twitter.
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