CIA site the victim of the latest LulzSec hacker attack

16 Jun 2011

Hacker group LulzSec has earned itself another notch with the brief taking down of the mighty Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) website.

The CIA now joins the US Senate, PBS, Sony and Nintendo as victims of cyber attacks by the mysterious LulzSec hacker group.

“Tango down – cia.gov – for the lulz,” LulzSec wrote in its Twitter feed.

The CIA website was taken down for an hour. However, there was no evidence that sensitive data on the CIA’s internal network was tampered with.

LulzSec terms itself, “World leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense” and last month it hacked into the PBS website and posted fake articles claiming late rapper Tupac Shakur was alive and living in New Zealand because PBS ran a documentary on WikiLeaks the group felt was unfair.

The attack on the US Senate this week has prompted officials to order a security review after LulzSec hackers broke into a server and published files online.

The dizzying array of data breaches and cyber attacks show no sign of slowing down in a period of months that has seen Sony, RSA, Lockheed Martin, Citibank and many others fall victim to attacks by hacker activists, or ‘hactivists’.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com