'Tango Down': Anonymous claims attacks on CIA, Alabama state sites
By M. Alex Johnson
The hacker group Anonymous claimed it launched an ambitious set of attacks Friday, saying it had taken down the CIA's website and had harvested the personal information of 46,000 people in Alabama.
Neither claim could immediately be confirmed, but the CIA's site remained unavailable late Friday afternoon.
An Anonymous member tweeted CIA TANGO DOWN, using a military expression for the killing of an important target:
(Don't worry; the shortened link takes you to a safe news report on the incident.)
Gizmodo quoted a member of Anonymous as saying the CIA was under a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, by a group of anti-pedophile hackers.
The CIA had no immediate comment, but the length of the site's disappearance suggests either an unusually extensive DDoS assault or a different form attack that could have infiltrated the agency's servers directly. That would mark a notable advance in the ability of Anonymous or hackers claiming to be affiliated with it to penetrate cyberdefenses.
In a further indication that the group could be stepping up its generally anti-bureaucracy, pro-open-Internet approach, Anonymous separately claimed responsibility for an attack on Alabama government servers, saying it had harvested the personal information — including dates of birth, Social Security numbers and criminal records — for 46,000 state residents.
In an Internet post that msnbc.com is not linking to, the Anonymous operative said the attack was launched in opposition to "recent racist legislation in an attempt to punish immigrants as criminals."
That appears to be a reference to a law Gov. Robert Bentley signed in June that has been called the nation's toughest immigration legislation. The posting linked to an msnbc.com story from September in which state officials promised to fully enforce the new law.
The post said the personal data would be deleted. But it did publish edited samples from 500 residents as proof of its claim — something Anonymous isn't known to have done before when the information involved private individuals, rather than government or police officials.
The attack resembles one that Anonymous claimed Tuesday night, when the Salt Lake City, Utah, police website went down under a DDoS campaign. A purported Anonymous member told NBC station KSL that that attack harvested phone numbers, addresses and email addresses of police officers and officials, as well as information on drug operations, suppliers, license plate numbers and more.
That attack came a day after yet another similar attack on a website for the West Virginia Chiefs of Police Association. The same Anonymous group that claimed Friday's CIA attack — calling itself CabinCr3w — claimed responsibility harvesting the personal information of more than 150 police officers.
