Anonymous Takes Down CIA Website, Again
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Anonymous supporters during a 2008 protest against the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles. CREDIT: Vincent Diamante/Creative Commons |
Capping off a busy week of hacks, denial-of-service attacks and general harassment, the gentle folk of Anonymous took down the CIA website ... again.
"CIA TANGO DOWN" trumpeted the @YourAnonNews Twitter feed, one of many Anonymous-related microblogs, at 3:25 pm ET Friday.
As of 5:00 pm ET, CIA.gov was still unreachable, presumably felled by a distributed denial-of-service attack that clogged up the targeted servers with useless requests for information.
Last June, the Anonymous subset known as LulzSec took down the CIA website as a response to a challenge by a rival hacker.
A denial-of-service attack will do little damage to a site such as the CIA's, which is mostly informational and does not enable any financial transactions. Bringing down the website of an online retailer would be much more costly, but such sites are normally more robust.
In the past 10 days, various Anonymi have released email login data from Chinese hardware manufacturer Foxconn, leaked emails from the Syrian presidential offices, "doxed" (i.e. published personal data about) American Nazi leaders as well as police officers in several states, and cheered on a shadowy Indian hacker who released source code belonging to anti-virus software maker Symantec.
The most spectacular Anonyhack, however, was hopping onto a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard discussing ... Anonymous. The merry pranksters promptly put the entire call up on YouTube.
