The website of National Crime Agency (NCA), a national law enforcement agency in the United Kingdom
which replaced the Serious Organised Crime Agency, was temporarily
down on Tuesday morning by attackers.
According to a news report published in The Guardian,
the attackers did this as a revenge for arrests made last week. Four days ago
before the attack, six teenagers were released on bail on suspicion of using
hacking group Lizard Squad’s cyber-attack tool to target websites and services.
They arrests were
in an operation codenamed Vivarium, coordinated by the NCA and involving
officers from several
police forces.
Those who were arrested: an 18-year-old from Huddersfield;
an 18-year-old from Manchester; a 16-year-old from Northampton; and a
15-year-old from Stockport, were arrested last week, while two other suspects,
both 17, were arrested earlier this year, one from Cardiff and another from
Northolt, north-west London.
However, all of them have been bailed, while a further two
18-year-olds – one from Manchester and one from Milton Keynes – were
interviewed under caution.
“The six suspects are accused of using Lizard Stresser, a
tool that bombards websites and services with bogus traffic, to attack a
national newspaper, a school, gaming companies and a number of online
retailers,” the report reads.
The NCA spokesperson told The Guardian that the NCA
website is an attractive target. Attacks on it are a fact of life. DDoS is a
blunt form of attack which takes volume and not skill. It isn’t a security breach,
and it doesn’t affect our operational capability.
“At worst it is a temporary inconvenience to users of our
website. We have a duty to balance the value of keeping our website accessible
with the cost of doing so, especially in the face of a threat which can scale
up endlessly. The measures we have in place at present mean that our site is
generally up and running again within 30 minutes, though occasionally it can
take longer. We think that’s proportionate,” he added.