CIA Website Attacked By Hackers, U.S. Official Confirms

A U.S. official has confirmed that the website belonging to the Central Intelligence Agency, which was inaccessible for hours on Wednesday evening, suffered a cyber attack.

Hacker group LulzSec, which spearheaded attacks on PBS.org, Sony, the Senate, and other organizations, claimed responsibility for taking CIA.gov offline, tweeting, "Tango down - cia.gov - for the lulz."

Politico reports:

The disruption on the CIA’s public website Wednesday did not involve “any kind of outside intrusion,” a U.S. official told POLITICO. [...]

The technical issues cia.gov experienced are more consistent with a “distributed denial of service attack,” which is an attempt to overwhelm the servers of a website so people cannot access it.

In one of two hacks this week directed at Senate computers, LulzSec successfully stole information that it later posted on its website.

LulzSec said of the hack, "We don't like the US government very much. Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren't very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we've decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more!"

According to The Next Web, LulzSec has released personal information, such as email addresses and names, belonging to over 100,000 users, and on Thursday posted 62,000 users' logins that are believed to have been taken from the site Writerspace.com.

Comments

[guveqzero]

11:31 AM on 06/19/2011

The tech folks at the cia sound like idiots. Typical, I am sorry to say, of a country in decline and in denial. When they let our technology be exported overseas, they bled us dry.

[anthonytaurus]

08:48 PM on 06/17/2011

These hacks are boring!! Stick to mIRC with this script kiddie nonsense. Moving along.....

[frenchfrog]

06:01 PM on 06/17/2011

Update: cia.gov down AGAIN (will the Lulz ever stop?).

Let's just be thankful they didn't take down icanhazcheezburger.com.

[Aarroonn Fleszar]

04:32 PM on 06/17/2011

Doesn't this happen like a million times a day?

[nothing2fear]

01:42 PM on 06/17/2011

I predict that this other such stories are out there so government can censor or manage the internet. The freedom of the people that exists on the internet and our communication is making it hard for them to keep us from communicating with one another and I don't think they like what we are collectively saying. What you will not find in our managed media you will find on the net. Keep them out, what the CIA is hiding is of less import ants to our freedoms than our ability to communicate without their controls. We have allowed them to subvert the constitutional protect of warrant with the Patriot Act lets not let them subvert our other rights to communicate with one another.

[EcnelisDoogod]

02:50 PM on 06/17/2011

The ability to reply directly to the sent email was compromised. Hmmm..

Anyway, I agree with your point. The walls of censorship seem to be closing in. I doubt that the CIA was/is in any sort of danger.

[nothing2fear]

03:17 PM on 06/18/2011

Here is another instance of what might be censorship of a liberal film. Thought you might be interested.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article28296.htm

[Your Mother]

11:59 AM on 06/17/2011

I'm going to go ahead and guess that the CIA's public facing site isn't exactly Fort Knox in terms of security. Somehow, I doubt the CIA has enacted massive security measures protecting the "about CIA" or "Kids page" on their homepage.

[hypnotoad72]

01:01 PM on 06/17/2011

Unless they have their own private cloud, isolated from the internet we all use and enjoy.  Logical, since they let the original internet be opened up for everybody to use and it would be illogical to put anything so sensitive onto it.  Time and time again, hacking is inevitable and the key is an efficient infrastructure.  Not cutting corners and licensing and outsourcing it to a third party and hope they are bothered to do their jobs. 

(note, "outsourcing" doesn't imply or suggest "offshoring" in any way, shape, or form.  I'm talking about control and responsibility and one can outsource work to anybody, but then get all mad when there's a problem and the people they outsourced to just happened to outsource the work to someone else, who in turn outsourced... and 7 subcontractors later... gets to be messy and surely more expensive, but people only prefer their sticker costs driving their purported gray matter nowadays...)

[Mike Dennison]

11:13 AM on 06/17/2011

I'm not sure that there's anything dumber than tweaking the nose of the CIA.

[dr strange 777]

11:02 AM on 06/17/2011

These guys are just a bunch of board sociopaths. Sad really.

[dr strange 777]

11:06 AM on 06/17/2011

I meant BORED. This is what American Public Education gets ya. ;)

[paganmist]

09:26 AM on 06/17/2011

I didn't want to be amused by the group that did this, but they have a site with "The Love Boat" playing in the background. The lyrics are written on the site, with "Lulz" replacing "Love", and now every time I hear that song, all I hear is, "The Lulz Boat."

[markIDGCONNECT]

09:03 AM on 06/17/2011

I think joocee102 is on to something for sure! Quite telling that this really wasn't a hack.

Mark at http://www.idgconnect.com/blog

[nomac]

11:16 AM on 06/17/2011

forgive me if i'm wrong, but isn't all the "hacking" in a D Dos attack done before the attack, you know like setting up bot nets or slaving a server, etc. Just a thought.

[Desolati0n]

11:22 AM on 06/17/2011

Not necessarily. Anonymous for example doesn't use bots, they just get 200+ people in an IRC channel to attack a targeted website, thus they have enough man power to crash the site. But if the website is running apache and has default connection settings, it can be exploited using a nifty little program called Slowloris.

[Tom Joad]

08:24 AM on 06/17/2011

...you have no chance to survive! Make your time! HA HA HA HA...

[Willie Huff]

08:30 AM on 06/17/2011

2002 called, they want their joke back ;) :P

[garder54]

08:06 AM on 06/17/2011

Kind of a misleading article. It wasn't really a hack. Just something that can be carried out by any group of people with an internet connection.

[Dr Juan]

07:58 AM on 06/17/2011

The real hacker challenge would be to take out all records of the MERS electronic mortgage record ponzi scheme. You can bet there are some back doors there.

[inguatu]

07:43 AM on 06/17/2011

HACK THE PLANET!!! - Hackers (1996)

[Willie Huff]

08:31 AM on 06/17/2011

HACK THE PLANET!

[Desolati0n]

11:15 AM on 06/17/2011

Hack the Gibson! Pull garbage files!

[ncconcernedcitizen]

07:11 AM on 06/17/2011

Let's increase their budget, that will help.

[inguatu]

07:40 AM on 06/17/2011

yeah because somehow made it into the article?

[hypnotoad72]

12:53 PM on 06/17/2011

They've "saved" $3 billion over the last 2 years and moved services to the cloud.  And plan to upgrade the electric grid to be "smart", using the cloud as well.  Not a bright idea once the security aspects are completely contemplated, but whatever...

Incidentally, and it's surely a total coincidence, the country's first CIO announced his resignation a couple days ago and is going to teach at Harvard.  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/kundra-steps-down-as-us-cio-to-new-harvard-job/50867?tag=mantle_skin;content