SOCA, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, appears to have become the latest casualty of the LulzSec hacking group as its website was sporadically inaccessible today.
In an echo of the announcement LulzSec made about its attack on the CIA's website, a message on Twitter announced the news of the denial-of-service attack in simple terms:
Tango down - soca.gov.uk - in the name of #AntiSec
As I've explained before - a denial-of-service attack is a bit like "15 fat men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time". A website becomes so flooded with unwanted traffic that genuine visitors to the site find it difficult, or impossible, to get through.
LulzSec's anarchic activities are a thorn in the side of the computer crime authorities, and the irony of SOCA (whose staff investigate cybercrimes in the UK) being knocked out by an attack from the hacking gang will not be lost on anyone.
The question that everyone wants answered, of course, is "Who are the people behind LulzSec, and when will they be brought to justice?"
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Except its not down. It was up within 7 minutes of their posting that link, as when i checked it was up and accessible and said tweet was 7 minutes old. So they might have been down, but recovered very quickly.
I think it was up and down more times than the proverbial for a while..
So the script kiddies were not doing that good after their initial success so all they do now is DDoS?
As Sony found out, DDoS can be used to distract the defender and reduce their ability to detect and react quickly to other attacks. Their post also allude to this, stating "DDoS is of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition. Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes."
Lulzsec were ridculing Jester because of his DDOS attacks. But look : Lulzsec is resorting to the same weapons.
They are just mocking him and continue to do so.. Jester is just a looser.
They've provide time and time again that they can cause some serious damage, and constantly sit on material that they do not release many of their victims don't even know that they've been hacked until they release the content. Scary Really !!!
Where by Jester just uses a DDOS cause that's the only thing he's able to use. Mind you everyone can initiate a DDOS.
Umm it's loser, why can't people know that looser is what happens when you're not tight. Anyways, I don't think Jester uses DDOS, I think he just uses DOS.. DDOS generally requires the use of a botnet or some other collection of multiple computers, Jester has his own tool, last I checked, he doesn't rely on the masses like lulz does, he does his own stuff.
They're playing with too much fire now, only a matter of time before they get burned.
I don't think this is all that embarassing for SOCA. It simply shows that they have been focussing their budget on fighting serious crimes rather than paying for huge amounts of bandwidth for their brochure site just in case some idiot decides to point a Botnet at it for a while?
They were not using their powerful lizard cannons, just itsy bitsy cannons. They did it for the lulz.