CIA, U.N. websites taken down by hacker groups

Even the biggest and what most would assume are the most secure websites can be taken down by an enterprising hacker, and that includes the CIA's website, which was taken down by the hacker group Anonymous on Friday afternoon.

Anonymous Tweeted the news via the @YourAnonNews Twitter feed at about 3:30 p.m. EST on Friday afternoon. The Tweet crowed, "CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous."

As of 6:15 p.m. EST, the site was still down, as can be seen by the screenshot taken at that time, shown above.

The hacker group did not release details of the attack. However, when involved in taking down a site, the group generally uses a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Frequently they use the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) cross platform utility to carry out the attack.

Anonymous didn't stop there, having a busy Friday. Its Twitter feed also posted a link to pastebin, where they frequently post "press releases" and leaks. The Tweet said, "✹HACKED✹ 730MB of mailz + db from CAMIMEX: Mexican Chamber of Mines http://pastebin.com/g4rScjT2 | Mail: https://bitly.com/AazT2E #OpMexico #Anonymous"

That pastebin message exposed emails from the Mexican Mining Chamber, also known as "Camimex." Anonymous said they targeted Carmimex for corruption and harsh labor conditions. Specifically mentioning in a hashtag at the top of the pastebin post, the hack appears to be part of the Antisec movement against corruption in government and big business.

Last month, in the wake of the shutdown of the Megaupload file sharing website, Anonymous also attacked --- successfully --- the websites for the Department of Justice, the Copyright Office, and the FBI. In addition, last week the group leaked a conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard in which agents discussed ongoing hacker cases. The group boasted that it had had access to the emails of authorities for some time, and reported used the email of a foreign police official who received the conference call invitation as source for the conference call details.

Earlier this week, Anonymous leaked emails from the office of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which included preparatory material for a recent Barbara Walters interview. Also noted in the attack was the some of the officials had used the password "12345" for their accounts.

It was a busy day for hackers. Earlier in the day, a different group or single hacker, going by the handle "Casi" claimed responsibility for hacking the website of the United Nations. It is unclear why the U.N. was made a target.

Source
Image Source: Screenshot

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