CIA.gov Possibly Down, LulzSec Claims Responsibility

CIA.gov, the public website of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, seems to be down for some people. Some ReadWriteWeb writers could not get it to load, though some could.

LulzSec, the group who prosecuted an attack against the U.S. Senate website are taking responsibility.

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One of our writers, who lives 3 miles away from CIA headquarters got this message when he tried to load their site.

“The webpage at https://www.cia.gov/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.”

I, who live 3,000 miles from it, got what appeared to be the normal website.

Another hacker, known as @th3j35t3, or “The Jester,” has said “Gloves off” to the LulzSec group in a Twitter statement. “The Jester” is said to be responsible for a host of DDoS attacks on Islamist sites and targeted Wikileaks after their last release. In that attack he used the military phrase “tango down” which was parroted by LulzSec for their apparent CIA attack.

Thanks to Audrey Watters and Dan Rowinski for help on this article.

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