For a few hours Friday night (US time), the website of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) went offline in what appeared to be a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a computer security firm said.
Sophos said a group claiming to have ties with hacktivist group Anonymous posted a tweet about the hack Friday afternoon (early Saturday in Manila).
"CIA TANGO DOWN," said the group, bearing the Twitter handle "YourAnonNews".
The CIA website appeared normalas of 6:30 p.m. Saturday (Manila time).
But Sophos also pointed out it remains unclear whether Anonymous was indeed behind the outage.
"Anonymous doesn't have members, isn't a group in a conventional sense, and has arguably no official channels of communication. Without a defined hierarchy, anyone can claim to represent Anonymous if they wish, which means that even Anonymous itself can't actually claim that they did or did not launch an attack," it said.
Anonymous had been active in opposing recent legislation that had been criticized for their potential to muffle freedom of expression on the Internet.
On the other hand, Sophos noted there was no immediate suggestion that the CIA's own systems have been compromised.
For now, it said it merely appeared the CIA's servers have been so bombarded with traffic that their site is no longer accessible from the outside world. — TJD, GMA News
source:gmanetwork.com
