A distributed denial of service, or DDoS attack, brought CIA.gov down for hours late last week, in one of the longest-lasting assaults credited to the online hacktivist group Anonymous — and also an attack on perhaps the collective’s largest target yet. With a DDoS assault, a website’s server is flooded with an onslaught of requests, essentially overloading its capacity and rendering it nonoperational. In a video uploaded to YouTube over the weekend, a member claiming allegiance to the loose-knit hacktivist group explains that the assault on the CIA’s servers is now out of their control and even apologizes for the attack, but adds that the move has generated attention towards something much more serious than just the cybersecurity status of the agency.
According to the video uploaded on Saturday by the user MrAnonVids, the motive for the maneuver was not necessarily an anti-government one as with previously assaults in the episodic “FuckFBIFriday” campaign that offered similar results in the weeks before. In the case of the latest domestic attack, the alleged member reveals that the servers that struck out the CIA’s website with a DDoS attack were riddled with child pornography. Explaining what the CIA should do about it, the operative declares, “Your only choice is to act, and have them taken offline, which should have already happened.”
Self-proclaimed members of Anonymous have previously taken credit for dismantling the servers used by forums frequented by traders of child pornography. While the group has been able to cripple those sites in the past, it seems as if they are daring the CIA to do their work for them with last week’s attack. According to the video, six servers loaded with child pornography flooded CIA.gov, and while the intended purpose of the DDoS attack was not to take down the agency’s cite, the operative announces that “in doing so we have created a way more significant amount of attention to a situation that goes unnoticed far too often.”
Elsewhere in the YouTube statement, the person taking credit for the video says that the assault on the CIA was not wholly endorsed by the entire Anonymous collective and acknowledged that members of the group “have the capacity for the same errors of judgment and mistakes that everyone does.”
“Regardless of the reason it’s used, we are united under common goals, for the common good.”