As part of its combined cyber attack effort with Anonymous, hacker group LulzSec said today that it had successfully targeted the Web site for the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
Several hours ago, LulzSec tweeted that the SOCA Web site was offline "in the name of #AntiSec." For a time this afternoon, the soca.gov.uk Web site loaded, but a SOCA official told BBC News that it took its site offline "to limit the impact of DDOS attack on other clients hosted by our service provider."
The SOCA Web site, the spokesperson said, is hosted by an external provider and does not contain data from its investigations. Indeed, LulzSec and Anonymous do not appear to have posted any info from the SOCA site, but instead pulled off a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
"DDoS is of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition. Government hacking is taking place right now behind the scenes. #AntiSec," LulzSec tweeted.
AntiSec refers to Operation Anti-Security, a combined effort with Anonymous announced this morning that will target government agencies with which they disagree. "We encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path. We fully endorse the flaunting of the word 'AntiSec' on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art," LulzSec said in a statement.
LulzSec promised to later "unleash fire on multiple targets" The group said the "Oldschool Internet is back. Anarchy is now." Anonymous has not updated its Twitter feed or blog since this morning.
Also today, two hackers said they had successfully targeted the Sony Pictures France Web site.