Anonymous take down CIA site

As of 4 pm NZ time the CIA site  cia.gov would not load

Anonymous takes down CIA.gov

PC Magazine,

10 February,

2012

Anonymous has ended a rather busy week with a hack of the CIA website, which is currently offline

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"CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous," the @YourAnonNews feed tweeted around 3:30pm Eastern.

The CIA.gov website has been unresponsive for about an hour. Anonymous did not release details about the attack, but the group usually uses distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to take down its targets.

Last month, in the wake of the Megaupload shutdown, Anonymous also took down the websites for the Department of Justice, the Copyright Office, and the FBI.

Just last week, meanwhile, it also leaked a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard in which agents discussed ongoing hacker cases. Anonymous reportedly accessed the call because a foreign police official who received the conference call invite forwarded it to a personal account, where it was intercepted by Anonymous.

This week, the hacker collective focused its attention on overseas issues. It leaked emails from the office of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which included prep material for a recent Barbara Walters interview. It also released emails from the legal team who represented Frank Wuterich, the U.S. staff sergeant who led an assault on the Iraqi city of Haditha that left 24 unarmed civilians dead.

Also this week, a hacker loosely affiliated with Anonymous posted code from security firm Symantec on The Pirate Bay. The hacker had reportedly demanded a $50,000 ransom in exchange for keeping the code offline, but negotiations broke down.

From the New Zealand Herald

Anonymous takes down CIA website

The website of the Central Intelligence Agency was inaccessible yesterday after the hacker group Anonymous claimed to have knocked it offline.

"CIA Tango down," a member of Anonymous said on @YourAnonNews, a Twitter feed used by the group. "Tango down" is an expression used by the US Special Forces when they have eliminated an enemy.

Attempts to access the CIA website at cia.gov were unsuccessful.

More than two hours after the initial attack on the site attempts by AFP to reach cia.gov were met with a message saying the Web page was not available.

Asked about the apparent website outage, a CIA spokeswoman said: "We are looking into these reports."

Members of Anonymous also claimed Friday to have hacked the website of Camimex, the Mexican chamber of mines, and posted emails taken from the site online.

Like CIA.gov, the camimex.org.mx site was unavailable on Friday.

Anonymous last month briefly knocked the websites of the US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation offline.

Those attacks were in retaliation for the US shutdown of file-sharing site Megaupload.

There was no immediate explanation from Anonymous for the targeting of the CIA site.

In June, an Anonymous-affiliated group, Lulz Security, also temporarily disabled the CIA website.

Most Anonymous cyberattacks are distributed denial of service attacks in which a large number of computers are commanded to simultaneously visit a website, overwhelming its servers.

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