NSA
site down due to alleged DDoS attack
The
website for the United States National Security Agency suddenly went
offline Friday.
RT,
25
October, 2013
NSA.gov
has been unavailable globally as of late Friday afternoon, and
Twitter accounts belonging to people loosely affiliated with the
Anonymous hacktivism movement have suggested they are responsible.
Twitter
users @AnonymousOwn3r and @TruthIzSexy both were quick to comment on
the matter, and implied that a distributed denial-of-service attack,
or DDoS, may have been waged as an act of protest against the NSA
Allegations
that those users participated in the DDoS — a method of
over-loading a website with too much traffic — are currently
unverified, and @AnonymousOwn3r has previously taken credit for
downing websites in a similar fashion, although those claims have
been largely contested.
The
crippling of NSA.gov comes amid a series of damning national security
documents that have been disclosed without authorization by former
intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The revelations in the leaked
documents have impassioned people around the globe outraged by
evidence of widespread surveillance operated by the NSA, and a
massive “Stop Watching Us” rally is scheduled for Saturday in
Washington, DC.
DDoS
attacks are illegal in the United States under the Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act, or CFAA, and two cases are currently underway in
California and Virginia in which federal judges are weighing in on
instances in which members of Anonymous allegedly used the technique
to take down an array of sites during anti-copyright campaigns waged
by the group in 2010 and 2011. In those cases, so-called hacktivsits
are reported to have conspired together to send immense loads of
traffic to targeted websites, rendering them inaccessible due to the
overload.
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