CIA website down, Anonymous says it’s responsible

Anonymous bullhorn @YourAnonNews is claiming that the hacktivist group has taken down the Central Intelligence Agency‘s website.

“CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous,” a person behind @YourAnonNews tweeted.

The attack took place roughly around 12:10 p.m. Pacific time on Friday, and the website is still down an hour later.

Anonymous traditionally has “F*ck FBI Friday,” in which it attempts to take down or release information about the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Last week, the group released a phone call regarding Anonymous that took place between the FBI and Scotland Yard.

The group recently took down the US Department of Justice website as well as a number of a record label websites in response to the shutdown of file sharing website MegaUpload. Low-orbit-ion-cannons (LOIC) were used to issue denial of service attacks to the many websites it was targeting at the time. Denial of service attacks send multiple data requests to a website in the hopes of overloading its servers, resulting in the website becoming inaccessible. These requests are also called “packets,” thousands of which can be quickly sent using LOIC.

Anonymous was also accused of providing links on Twitter, which would install LOIC on any computer that clicked the link. These links helped Anonymous recruit innocent bystanders to their cause, launching denial of service attacks from any of the computers that accessed the link.

A similar attack may have been used to take down the CIA website, although it doesn’t look like the group distributed any of the same links that helped take down the DOJ.

hat tip RT

Anonymous image via Shutterstock