The NCA website was taken down by the notorious hacking group, Lizard Squad.
The National Crime Agency, or NCA, is a UK body tasked with apprehending organised crime, having replaced the serious organised crime agency in 2013. The attack has come as an act of retaliation for the arrest of 6 people for using lizard squad’s DDoS tool by the NCA.
While a DDoS may not cause long term instability for the agency, the fact that it was caught unprepared and taken down has sent a wave of surprise across the internet community.
An NCA spokesperson was quick to denounce the attacks and downplay the impact of the attack, saying that the operational capability of the NCA was not harmed by the attack and caused nothing more than a ‘temporary inconvenience’.
However there are experts warning that DDoS attacks are far more than just a trickster taking down a website for a little while. Dave Larson, CTO at Corero Network Security has stated that DDoS attacks are not always what they seem. Namely, a DDoS can act as a smokescreen diversion which allows hackers to run additional attacks aimed at breaching sensitive data and further impacting operations. Some experts say that Denial of service attacks can also be labelled as a denial of security – namely, while the attack is in place, security measures can’t cope anymore and hackers can venture inside the network.
With this in mind, Lizard Squad’s actions today could preclude a larger attack in the future – only time will tell.
