The CIA website was taken offline by hackers Wednesday afternoon. Anonymous hacking group Lulzsec is taking credit.
"Tango down—cia.gov—for the lulz," the "griefer" outfit tweeted Wednesday at about 6:15 p.m. ET, at which time the Central Intelligence Agency's site was still not responding.
By about 7 p.m., cia.gov was back online.
A CIA spokesman would not confirm Lulzsec's claim beyond saying the agency was looking into the matter.
Lulzsec has in recent weeks conducted a number of high-profile attacks, including data heists from theSony PlayStation Network and FBI affiliate Infragard, as well as hacks of such disparate websites as PBS.org, Fox.com, and, also on Wednesday, the U.S. Senate's public site.
The group is now apparently accepting hacking requests. Lulzsec sent out this message to its 150,000 Twitter followers on Tuesday: "Now accepting calls from true lulz fans—let's all laugh together at butthurt gamers. 614-LULZSEC, accepting as many as we can, let's roll."
Lulzsec is theorized to be an offshoot of the Anonymous hacking group that has evolved in recent years from its reputed origins in the mid-2000s on imageboards like 4chan to become a globally recognized threat to cybersecurity.
In early May, when the group calling itself LulzSec first appeared, an apparent schism was developing between members of the AnonOps IRC network of Anonymous. A former network administrator for AnonOps identified as "Ryan" claimed credit for temporarily disabling AnonOps, saying that Anonymous' principles of "leaderless" actions were being compromised by a self-appointed group of 10 individuals.
The group has said it carried out one of its Sony hacks using "a very simple SQL injection." Wednesday's takedown of the CIA site is further evidence that LulzSec is also capable of launching massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks—a hallmark of Anonymous' actions using its "Low Orbit Ion Cannon" voluntary botnet.
LulzSec's name is a portmanteau of Internet-speak for "laugh out loud" and "security."