The official website of the National Security Agency (NSA) was down for several hours on Saturday. It was down for several hours Friday but the government agency denied speculations that it was due to distributed denial of service or DDoS. The agency said it was due to an internal error during a scheduled update. DDoS occurs when hackers take control of computers and overload web servers.
The site was inaccessible starting at around 2 p.m. EST Friday and speculations came from all corners of the web, thinking that the website was hacked. Twitter accounts allegedly linked to the loosely organized hackers' group Anonymous seemed to claim responsibility but messages from the handles came hours after the incident.
"Aww don't panic about nsa.gov being down. They have a backup copy of the internet," tweeted a certain @AnonyOps.
"We sail strong. #tangodown #nsa," tweeted @annoymousAsia, another account allegedly connected to Anonymous.
There were others who claimed via Twitter that they were responsible for the downtime, but the NSA immediately released a statement to explain the situation.
"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," a spokesperson from the agency said in statement.
The website went back online around 10:30 pm Friday but as of writing, the site is down again.
"Operation Troll The NSA" was launched by hackers earlier this year in protests related to surveillance leaks by Edward Snowden, a former contractor of the NSA, who has sought asylum in Russia.
Hacker groups such as Anonymous often clashed with authorities on issues of file-sharing as well as donations to WikiLeaks, another anti-secrecy group that unveiled confidential and top secret wires between the federal government and its embassies in different corners of the globe.
This is not the first time the website was hacked. In June, the NSA site was down for roughly 13 hours following the explosion of the PRISM controversy. Uncoordinated attacks by different hacking groups were launched to crash the agency's servers. One of the groups allegedly sent out email scripts containing terror-keywords that bugged down the surveillance apparatus of the government.
