SOCA Website Back Up After Lulzsec DDoS Attack

Hacker group Lulzsec claims it brought down the website of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) on Monday afternoon with a distributed denial of service attack. The site is now back and SOCA says no operational data was accessed.

Hours after announcing it had joined forces with fellow hacktivist group Anonymous to launch  ‘Operation Anti-Security’ targeting governments and banks it seems the UK’s FBI-equivalent was the first victim.

The SOCA website had been unavailable for much of the afternoon when the hacker group’s Twitter feed announced at about 5pm: “Tango down – soca.gov.uk – in the name of #AntiSec”.

The group went on to say: “DDoS is of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition. Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes.”

A SOCA spokesman said this morning: “The SOCA website has been reactivated this morning. SOCA chose to take its website offline temporarily last night to limit the impact of the Distributed Denial of Service attack on other clients hosted by out service provider.

“The SOCA website only contains publicly available information and does not provide access to SOCA’s operational material or data.”

Taking on the the government

Last week, Lulzsec claimed responsibility for a similar attack on the website of America’s CIA and a breach of the US Senate’s website.

SOCA is the second UK government organisation to attract the attention of Lulzsec. On 10 June the group said it had stolen administrative passwords belonging to the National Health Service.

On that occasion it opted to warn the NHS about the security flaw so that it could be patched up.

Since first hitting the headlines in May, Lulzsec has set about achieving its goal of highlighting weak levels of online security and entertaining its members and Twitter followers with attacks on the likes of Sony, Nintendo and American X Factor.

This morning its Twitter feed claimed it was categorising and formatting leaked items from other ‘AntiSec’ activities for release on their website and The Pirate Bay