NSA website down after “technical error”

26 Oct 2013

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The National Security Agency's website went down for several hours yesterday, but the security agency  blamed the outage on a technical error.

The website, NSA.gov, went down in the afternoon, setting off speculation on Twitter, that a distributed denial-of-service attack by hackers might be responsible for the disruption.

However, a NSA spokesperson denying the claims, said they were "not true.

He added, NSA.gov was not accessible for several hours due to an internal error that occurred during a scheduled update. He added, the issue would be resolved the evening.

Though hacker group Anonymous joked about the incident in a tweet, it did not say if it had any role in it. "Aw don't panic about nsa.gov being down. They have a backup copy of the internet," it said.

There have been several clashes between the loosely organised, international hacker collective and US authorities over file-sharing as also allowing banks to handle donations to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

The NSA's involvement in vast electronic surveillance operations, was recently revealed in a series of leaks from former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has obtained asylum in Russia.

''NSA.gov was not accessible for several hours tonight because of an internal error that occurred during a scheduled update,'' the spy agency said in an emailed statement. ''The issue will be resolved this evening. Claims that the outage was caused by a distributed denial of service attack are not true.''

The secret agency's website had been down for nearly six hours, earlier this evening and the site continued to be inaccessible for some users.

An NSA spokesperson had earlier told ABC News the agency's internal, sensitive network was ''not at all'' compromised and no classified information was in danger.

Meanwhile, a hacktivist group claimed responsibility for the DDOS attack on NSA the site.

In DDoS attacks the target website is flooded with rapid computer-generated traffic until the servers are overloaded and the site collapses.

The cyber tactic, a relatively unsophisticated one leaves the internal network of the target system intact.

The ultra secretive NSA, nicked named once as "No Such Agency,: today finds itself at the centre of a major controversy and target of criticism over the past months after a string of revelations about its vast foreign and domestic surveillance programmes by Snowden (See: Snowden has information to hurt US, more than anyone else: Journalist).

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