Hackers temporarily knocked offline a Website run by the British police Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which targets organised crime in Britain and overseas. Lulz Security, a loosely aligned hacker group which said it brought down the SOCA Website on Monday, has gone after a long list of government and corporate Websites in the past month.
Like the others, it was likely a denial-of-service attack where Lulz hackers bombarded the site with so many messages that it went offline. "We are aware of claims that the SOCA Website has been attacked. The picture is not clear at this time but we are investigating the matter with our service provider," said SOCA spokesman Richard Sellors.
Lulz also hacked into a US Senate server, and claimed responsibility for temporarily knocking offline the CIA's public Website. In a posting on Sunday, Lulz Security declared that the "Lulz Lizard battle fleet is now declaring immediate and unremitting war" on government and whitehat security. As part of that, Lulz, which derives its name from the plural variant of Internet slang for "laugh out loud," urged its followers to hack into and deface government Websites.