21-01-12 How was the Justice Department web site attacked?

Hackers successfully crippled the Justice Departments Web site Thursday,scoring the second significant attack on a major government site in six months and once again prompting questions about the protection of federal Internet properties.An apparent denial of service attack,which overloads a sites servers with requests for access,crippled portions of www.Justice.gov Thursday afternoon.Despite the hours-long outage,Justice and White House officials initially said they unaware of the attack.By late Thursday,DOJ admitted its site was experiencing a significant increase in activity,resulting in a degradation in service,and officials said they would treat the situation as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.A loosely affiliated group of hackers known as Anonymous said the attack was in response to DOJs decision to shut down Megaupload.com on charges that the popular Web site illegally shared movies,television shows and e-books.Several of the sites executives were indicted and arrested Thursday by the FBI.In July,another hacker group,LulzSec,claimed responsibility for taking down the CIAs Web site for about two hours.Days later,Anonymous celebrated a successful denial of service attack on MasterCards site.Hackers also used about 60,000 compromised computers around the world with varying success in 2009 to target sites for the White House,the Department of Homeland Security,the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration.The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team,a component of DHS,is responsible for monitoring major cybersecurity threats for the federal government and the private sector,but each federal agency is responsible for its own information technology security,leading to a disparate,unorganized system of protocols and protections that costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually.