The District and New York City governments were the targets Thursday of a major cyber-attack, which crippled their websites for hours as the self-avowed culprits vowed to initiate more attacks and D.C. authorities sought a federal investigation.
An internal city email obtained by The Washington Examiner showed District security officials warned city leaders of the attack’s opening stages late Wednesday.
“The District government has detected an attempted intrusion into its technology infrastructure system,” the 11:58 p.m. email from the Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency read. “We are aggressively working to resolve this matter.”
But the wave of attacks stretched well into Thursday, hobbling the District’s home page and the websites of D.C. agencies, limiting the availability of online services that range from submitting requests to city government to looking up tourism information.
The Underground Nazi hacker collective — commonly known as UGNazi — claimed responsibility for the assault.
“We attacked DC.gov because we do not like the way the government addresses the Internet. They act as if we have no input whatsoever, and they will pay for that,” a hacker who identified himself as “Cosmo” wrote in an email to The Examiner. “There will be many more attacks launched against D.C. and other government websites.”
Cosmo said the group used a distributed denial of service attack to overwhelm the District’s website by causing it to time out before fully loading. Mayoral spokesman Pedro Ribeiro said the District’s government continued to function during the attack and that vital city services weren’t disrupted.
A spokeswoman for the FBI said the agency was looking into the episodes after the District requested federal assistance.
“We are aware of the report of alleged hacking of local government websites and will take further investigative steps as warranted,” she said.
The District wasn’t the only major municipal government in the crosshairs of the cyber-attack. As it has for days, the website of New York City’s government experienced sporadic outages.
Cosmo, who said he lives on New York City’s Staten Island, said the group targeted the Big Apple because of its handling of the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Thursday was far from the first time UGNazi launched a major cyber-attack. The group said it was responsible for previous hacks against the websites of handbag designer Coach and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Those attacks were said to be related to the companies’ support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, a proposal that drew the ire of Internet activists. “Our agenda is to help serve the Internet and show that we do have our own rights,” Cosmo said Thursday.
