A group member tweeted the military expression ‘Tango Down’ to express the shutdown of the CIA servers. “Tango Down” is an expression used in military operations to indicate successful killing of important targets. While the claims remained officially unconfirmed, the CIA website remained unavailable for over 9 hours, and then spluttered back sluggish and slow-loading.
A member of Anonymous has been quoted as stating that the CIA was under a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack by an anti-pedophile group.
The long time for which the CIA web server was down indicates a heavy anomaly in operations.
While the attacks on the CIA web server were indirectly claimed to be orchestrated by Anonymous, the group directly claimed credit of attacking Alabama government servers, saying that the attack was launched in opposition to “recent racist legislation in an attempt to punish immigrants as criminals.”
Anonymous posted that the personal data of the citizens would be deleted, but it published the edited samples of the data of 500 residents as proof of its successful operation.
The attack on the CIA servers resembles the DDoS attack on the Utah Police Website by Anonymous last Tuesday. A member of the Anonymous told the NBC station that the attack had obtained personal data of police officers, and information on drug suppliers, license plate numbers and other material.
A part of Anonymous that calls itself CabinCr3w claimed credit of both Friday’s CIA attack as well as that of the attack on Utah Police servers. According to the group they had collected the personal data of more than 150 police officers in a similar attack on the website of the West Virginia Chiefs of Police Association.
The recent attacks can indicate that the hackers group is intensifying its anti-bureaucracy approach and directly targeting state machinery.