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Science & Technology

NSA Site Went Down for 11 Hours

They say it was an internal error, but hackers claim responsibility

Reason Staff | 10.26.2013 12:30 PM

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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.

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Reason Staff
Science & TechnologyNSAInternetSurveillance
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