CIA website brought down by DDoS attack, LulzSec hackers claim responsibility

The CIA website at cia.gov is currently inaccessible, having apparently fallen foul of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by hackers.

Almost inevitably, fingers are pointing towards the notorious LulzSec hacktivist group who have made a name for themselves recently with a series of attacks against corporations, organisations and websites – sometimes forcing them offline, and on other occasions stealing personal information by exploiting security flaws.

A post to LulzSec’s Twitter feed appears to confirm their participation in the attack:

https://twitter.com/LulzSec/status/81115804636155906

LulzSec claims to be exposing security vulnerabilities in websites and organisations for “fun”, but a poll conducted earlier today by Sophos discovered that many don’t believe hacking and denial-of-service attacks to be a laughing matter:

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.