The National Security Agency (NSA) website was down for at least 30 minutes on Friday due to internal error, not hacking as what rumors claim.
The site was reportedly down Friday as early as 3 p.m EST and was restored about 7 a.m EST Saturday. That was 16 hours long for an outage.
In an e-mail sent by a NSA official to Wall Street Journal, it says, “NSA.gov was not accessible for several hours tonight because of an internal error that occurred during a scheduled update. The issue will be resolved this evening. Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true.”
Contrary to the “internal error” NSA claims, a Twitter account associated with a hacker group identified as the elite hacktivist contingent, Anonymous, asserts they did it.
In a tweet sent out by the user @AnonyOps, it says, “Aww don’t panic about nsa.gov being down. They have a backup copy of the internet.”
Aside from @AnonyOps, another Twitter user, @anonymousAsia, who seems associated with the hacker group Anonymous, also claimed responsibility. Its tweet says, “We sail strong. #tangodown #nsa.”
“Tango down,” in hacker phraseology, means taking down a website.
NSA website denied of being exploited of a “denial of service attack” or being hacked. The security agency spokesperson Vanee Vines insists it was a just an internal error and they are attending to the issue. He didn’t detail though the cause of the internal error.
Denial of service attack (DoS attack) happens when hacking techniques involve sending a large amount of worthless traffic to take down websites -- which is very usual.
This alleged hacking incident is not the first for NSA. It has been hacked before. However, citizens should not contemplate and create rumors that might light up security uncertainties.
“There was no evidence anyone actually broke into the NSA’s network or stole any data,” the spokesperson said.
