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CIA website hacked; group claims 'credit'


The United States’ Central Intelligence Agency became sporadically inaccessible early Thursday (Manila time), even as a hackers’ group claimed credit for it. Visitors to the CIA website as of 7 a.m. experienced a slow loading of the site’s homepage at best, and a timeout error at worst. The site appeared to return to normal past 8:20 a.m. (Manila time). Hacker group LulzSec indicated it may have had something to do with the incident, as shown by an entry on its Twitter account. “Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz," said the Twitter entry. Computer security firm Sophos said the problem at the CIA website may have been due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack by hackers. Sophos senior security consultant Graham Cluley said fingers are pointing at LulzSec “almost inevitably," as the group had made a name for themselves recently with a series of attacks against corporations, organizations and websites. LulzSec’s attacks either forced targets offline, or resulted in the target’s data being stolen and posted online. “There has been a long catalog of attacks perpetrated by LulzSec in the last few weeks. For instance, earlier this month, LulzSec hacked into Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) affiliate InfraGard and exposed usernames, passwords and email addresses. The group also posted information about the US Senate's web servers earlier this week," Cluley said on a blog post. “With this new attack against the CIA website, you have to ask yourself if LulzSec has finally bitten off more than it can chew. After all, they've just poked a very grizzly bear with a pointy stick. LulzSec's cockiness may be their undoing," he added. — LBG, GMA News

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