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Hackers take down UK crime agency website with DDoS attack

Xinhua, September 1, 2015 Adjust font size:

The website of Britain's National Crime Agency (NCA) was temporarily taken down Tuesday morning in a wave of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by hacking group Lizard Squad.

The attack was carried out several days after the NCA announced that six teenagers were arrested on suspicion of using a DDoS tool developed by Lizard Squad to target websites.

Lizard Squad has claimed responsibility for the attack on twitter, which was seemingly a response to the arrests.

The arrests were part of the police operation targeting users of Lizard Squad's Lizard Stresser tool, a software that allowed users to pay to take websites offline for up to eight hours at a time, according to a previous NCA statement.

But an NCA spokesman said that the DDoS attack wasn't a security breach, and it did not affect the agency's operational capability."At worst it is a temporary inconvenience to users of our website."

In a situation like this, the measures NCA had in place could make sure that its website went back to normal in more or less 30 minutes, the spokesman also said. Endit