By Chloe Albanesius
Anonymous has ended a rather busy week with a hack of the CIA website, which is currently offline.
“CIA TANGO DOWN: #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.
www.pcmag.com, February 10, 2012