geekosystem

If you're trying to hide an extramarital affair, and you're the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, it's probably a good idea to use a method that hasn't been publicly known for years. Another good step would be avoiding a service, like Gmail, managed by a company that's been known to hand over information to the government when pressured. Perhaps David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell thought they were above all that, or perhaps they somehow didn't care, but the trick they used to hide their emails is old enough to have been included in a 2005 PBS special.

So the CIA's website is definitely down right now, and Anonymous is claiming responsibility. Given their previous track record, it's pretty safe to assume that this is exactly what it looks like. During they're last little frenzy after the MegaUpload takedown, Anonymous claimed to have taken down a slew of other high profile targets including the DOJ, MPAA, RIAA, and FBI websites, an attack on the CIA homepage would round out that list nicely. Granted, it's just a DDOS attack, not a more serious breach of security like a leaked phone call or anything, but it's still got to sting a bit if you're the CIA.

At 5:48 PM yesterday, hacker group Lulzsec claimed responsibility for taking down the CIA.gov website with a distributed denial of service attack. According to news outlets, the site was down or only intermittently accessibly until about 8:00 PM. Since the CIA site is publicly accessible, the likelihood that any sensitive information was compromised during the attack is highly unlikely. That doesn't make this attack any less embarrassing for the CIA, who surely do not take kindly to such provocations. While taking down the spy agency's website may seem like no mean feat, Lulzsec claimed on their Twitter feed that it was far from their "biggest" operation. For that, they directed users to a torrent of data gleaned from an intrusion into Sony's networks. Lulzsec followed up their attack by releasing over 62,000 password and email combinations for various web services, which apparently included Facebook and dating websites.

Today in things you couldn't possibly make up: The Washington Post reports that the CIA has launched an internal task force to evaluate the fallout from WikiLeaks' massive dump of U.S. diplomatic cables. Oh, and within CIA headquarters, the WikiLeaks Task Force is "mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F." Washington Post:

The irreverence is perhaps understandable for an agency that has been relatively unscathed by WikiLeaks. Only a handful of CIA files have surfaced on the WikiLeaks Web site, and records from other agencies posted online reveal remarkably little about CIA employees or operations. Even so, CIA officials said the agency is conducting an extensive inventory of the classified information, which is routinely distributed on a dozen or more networks that connect agency employees around the world.

To adapt a line from a Boing Boing reader, does this make them the men in the black ROFLcopters? (Washington Post via Boing Boing)