Anonymous takes down the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
On Friday, the website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was taken off line by hacktivists associated with the nebulous and notorious international Internet collective known as Anonymous.
Friday afternoon the Twitter account for @YourAnonNews tweeted:
"CIA TANGO DOWN: cia.gov #Anonymous"
The tweet included a link to a report confirming the news on the Russian site RT.com. RT America confirmed via Twitter that the CIA website was down for over 2 hours.
Most likely the Anonymous hacktivists used a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to take down the CIA website. A DDoS is an orchestrated attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. A DDoS attack does no permanent damage; the website is not hacked, and no information is tampered with, lost or stolen. Instead, the website is simply made unavailable to other web users for a short period of time.
A DDoS attack, if successful, is a short lived if embarrassing nuisance, and a temporary inconvenience for users of the website. The value of such attacks has always been symbolic - a means for Anonymous enthusiasts to flex their cyber muscle, and draw attention to causes they feel passionate about.
Some legal authorities argue a DDoS attack is analogous to a digital sit-in. The DDoS attack has been described by many as the moral equivalent of participating in a sit-in at a lunch counter during the civil rights movement, a relatively harmless act of civil disobedience.
Anonymous has a tradition of launching attacks against law enforcement agencies on Fridays. RT explains:
Traditionally known as FuckFBIFriday, this weekend eve turned into FuckCIAFriday, as hacktivists downed the official website for the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States cia.gov.
Last Friday, Feb. 3, in an epic display of cyber acumen, Anonymous hacktivists released a sensitive conference call between officials at Scotland Yard and the FBI discussing fellow Anonymous hacktivists being investigated for cybercrime. The 16 minute recording of the sensitive conference call between law enforcement officials on both sides of the Atlantic discussed an “on-going investigations related to Anonymous, Lulzsec, Antisec, and other associated splinter groups."
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