The website of the National Crime Agency (NCA) was down this morning, with the Twitter account believed to be that of Lizard Squad claiming responsibility.
"Stressed out?" read a Tweet by @LizardLands alongside a link to the inactive NCA website.
The NCA admitted that the website failure was due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which hits websites with huge amounts of data to make them inaccessible to users.
"The NCA website is being DDOS’d. This isn’t hacking, there’s been no intrusion – fairly standard cyber attack," the organisation tweeted.
The Lizard Squad account has been tweeting regularly about the recently launched Operation Vivarium, which led to the arrests of six UK citizens using the hacking group’s Lizard Stresser DDoS tool.
Around 50 individuals who were registered on the account but were not believed to have launched attacks were also visited.
The attack was presumably designed to embarrass the government body, especially since it is currently undergoing a drive to raise awareness of DDoS attacks.
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"DDoS attacks are not that expensive or hard to defend against," Tarzey added. "There are online services as well as on-premise appliances that can check for DDoS attacks and block traffic.
"[The] UK government may be cash-strapped but the NCA should not have been caught with its trousers down."
The Twitter account recently blasted the UK internet police as "the biggest jokes", directly tweeted to the NCA saying "come @ me" and claimed that the logs used in the recent arrests "contain zero credibility."
