No One Knows Why the NSA's Website Was Down for 11 Hours
The National Security Agency's website was down for several hours on Friday. But no one will confirm whether the outage was caused by a group of brash hackers attacking the website or if the hamster who normally keeps the place running simply stopped spinning on its wheel.
NSA.gov went out of service Friday shortly after 3 p.m., according to Gizmodo. Almost immediately some Twitter accounts loosely affiliated with Anonymous, the notorious hacktivist group known for executing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, started taking credit for the attack. Some other hacking groups claimed responsibility as well. But those all felt more like desperate stabs at undeserved Internet credibility than any hacker taking proper ownership for his or work. Some of hackers who jumped have reputations for falsely taking credit for attacks, too.
The official Anonymous social media accounts, the ones people trust, mostly made light of one of their biggest foes' most embarrassing moments:
That could mean whoever is responsible doesn't want to draw the eye of one of the world's most powerful spying agencies, or it could mean Kibbles took a much-needed vacation. Maybe there's a much simpler explanation here: the wheels behind the scenes stopped spinning. The NSA told CIRCA there was no attack, that the outage was caused by an "internal error" that happened at an inopportune time:
"NSA.gov was not accessible for several hours tonight because of an internal error that occurred during a scheduled update. The issue will be resolved this evening. Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true."
The truth is out there somewhere.
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