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Although the official website of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States seems to be down, there is no way of confirming it is the result of a hacking job by Anonymous.
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The tweet earlier today simply read, “CIA Tango Down.” Tango down is a slang term used by military forces to indicate an enemy has been eliminated.
If the site’s downtime is due to a denial-of-service-attack on CIA.gov users, it will be one of the group’s most ambitious moves.
Many Anonymous cyberattacks are carried out by co-ordinating an overwhelming number of visits to one website to overload its servers.
The group has previously targeted the US Department of Justice and the US Copyright Office, as well as Universal Music Group and Warner Music.
As of 22.15pm, the website was still inaccessible.
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Rab I DO pay my taxes and I DO pay all my own bills – I don’t have a mortgage – I don’t go on (and never have) holidays I can’t afford – the only thing I bought during the mythical boom was a second hand car which I worked hard and paid for myself – and now I AM EXPECTED to pay for the “we all partied brigade” – Well you know what Rab – WHY THE HELL SHOULD I? (caps not shouting but for emphasis) I’m fed up with being told to “pay my taxes” when I’ve never done ANYTHING but PAY for everything I’ve ever had or bought and I NEVER landed any of my bills on anyone else (what the hell would give me the right to do that???) but yet, I and lots of people in the same position as me are expected to pay for the excessive expenditure of those who partied hard and invested in 2nd/3/rd properties and property abroad, flash clothes, cars, holidays,etc etc etc. During the boom I was called stupid & a fool for not getting involved and now I get snide comments on how “great” I was not to get involved.
DON’T YOU DARE PREACH TO ME Rab – pay whatever YOU owe; but don’t expect others to PAY FOR YOU.
It seems a misinterpretation of my comment as sparked some emotional outpour; so allow me to clarify: I wasn’t commenting on whether the household charge is just or not, I was remarking on the peculiar mentality of some who find the single charge an attack on their liberty and yet paid the incomes hikes and levies with little fuss.
And I found the power of a percentage mark over some rather depressing.
@’Soverign Being’ – I’ll take ‘slave’ now rather than ‘slave + late payment fee’ later. Or would you prefer tax-evading criminal?
@Aydo – I would contend that the hard-working, resiliant, tax-payers of Ireland are what is holding this nation together (regardless of whether we deserve it or not) Thankfully we seem to be in the majority – it’s one of the few things that separate us from the Greeks.
And for the record, I’ve never taken a bank loan in my life.
Who ever claimed that they were a secret organization? They have public director and a massive headquarters and the US government publicly refers to their reports.
Right. Not having ever visited the website, just wondering – does it tell us where are the CIA secret interrogation centres across the world? Or how many extraordinary extradition flights have passed through Shannon? Or the CIA’s annual accounts? What they spend on laundry each year, perhaps…
Its a sham, ask urself, who benefits from this? The ordinary citizen who wants internet freedom or governments who do not.
Que Bono and no im not referring to U2 either.
So we should sit back and take it? Ehh no thanks! I’m happy that I am being represented by these guys and in particular “AnonOpsSweden” who are really looking out for us Irish.
Moral justice is great, but respect for law is paramount. Law is law is law. Don’t like the law then change the law & push to get the law changed, don’t break the law.
@Gavin We live in a peaceful democracy where the current Government were democratically elected by the citizens. If you can justify an external organisation taking intervention at this level, you can justify any type of action.
If you don’t mind, we the people, will sort out this issue our own way. Anybody has the right to petition their TD on this matter and representative bodies have the ability to make representation.
Yes we the people make mistakes as we have collectively done over the past 10 years and are now paying for.
there’s no democracy in removing websites that the taxpayer is paying for or removing the websites of democratically elected officials.
Well respectfully, @Brian Daly, that does not work! You can’t sit back and do nothing. The government do not care what the electorate have to say. That has been proved by the adjustment to the fiscal treaty and Sean Serlocks refusal to a) meet with individuals concerned with the current layout of the SI and his refusal to schedule a full debate in the dail for this issue.
Alternate protests are all that we have at this moment in time. The Irish public are too laid back! You will never see the same scenes that are on view in Athens here in Dublin.
I’m not so sure Seán’s right, Anonymous are the biggest and most well known (so to speak) hacking group on the planet and to date only one of them (that we know of) has been caught. This latest attack required a huge “botnet”, a lrge group og computers around the plantet that they had taken control of, each one known as a “zombie”, they were likely planted with a custom made virus so that at a given time each of these “zombie computers” would begin attacking the CIA website, in reality asking it for information requests over and over. The site itself can likely handle hundreds of thousands of hits a day, but not millions of requests for information at the same time, this effectively shuts it down untill its Administrators can find a workaround. Meanwhile when the Powers that Be trace the attack it’ll come from all over the globe, maybe one of your computers was running slow in the past day or so, maybe it was a zombie computer unknown to you, the real attackers, Anonymous, won’t be anywhere near it.
All fun and games in their Moms basement until they get labelled as “terrorists” and the Patriot Act is evoked. They would want to cover their tracks well. Obama is not as liberal as many think and a Republican, if elected , would have them down as public enemy number 1!
I’d say this is all just practice that’s leading up to something big no? Just showing what they are capable of so they can make a threat that will feel legitimate enough to have some attention paid……
Often they use a DDoS attack to cover what one or two more experienced users will be doing in the background.
This has been the case during a number of attacks that have resulted in users accounts and personal information being compromised.
Sony PSN was offline for over a month because of one of these attacks just last April.
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