LulzSec 'takes down' CIA website

15 June 2011 Last updated at 21:00 ET

The hacker group Lulz Security has claimed it has brought down the public-facing website of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

The alleged hack on CIA.gov occurred on the same day the group opened a telephone request line so its fans could suggest potential targets.

On its Twitter feed, the group wrote: "Tango down - cia.gov - for the lulz".

The CIA website was inaccessible at times on Wednesday but the hack claim could not immediately be verified.

It was unclear if the outage was due to LulzSec's efforts or to the large number of internet users trying to check the site.

'Denial of service'

LulzSec has risen to prominence in recent months by attacking Sony, Nintendo, several US broadcasters, and the public-facing site of the US Senate.

On Wednesday it claimed to have launched denial of service attacks on several websites as a result of opening its "request line", although it gave no details.

The claim regarding the CIA.gov website emerged a few hours later. A CIA spokesman told the Associated Press the agency was "looking into" the report.

LulzSec publicised the details of its telephone hotline on its Twitter feed.

Callers to the US number are met with a recorded message, in a heavy French accent, by an individual calling himself Pierre Dubois.

While the 614 area code appears to relate to the state of Ohio, it is unlikely that this is its real location.

Lulz Security said it had used distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against eight sites suggested by callers.

It also claimed to have hit the websites of gaming magazine The Escapist, and multiplayer games EVE Online and League of Legends.

DDoS attacks typically involve crashing a website by inundating it with requests from computers under the attacker's control.

Protest groups

Little is known about Lulz Security, other than their apparent "hacktivist" motivation.

The organisations and companies that it targets are often portrayed as having acted against the interests of citizens or consumers.

Its high-profile attack on SonyPictures.com exposed the company's ongoing inability to secure users' personal data, LulzSec claimed.

Along with Anonymous, LulzSec has raised the profile of hacker groups as a potential threat to online services.

Hacktivists see their role as staging valid protests in the most high profile way possible, according to Peter Wood, founder of security consultancy First Base.

"The things they are exploiting at the moment are the sort of mistakes that organisations seem to have been making ever since they connected to the internet.

"Finally there are some players out there who are using them as a means to protest. Whether everyone agrees with them is a different question."

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LulzSec opens hack request line

15 June 2011 Last updated at 06:24 ET

The hacker group Lulz Security has opened a telephone request line so its fans can suggest potential targets.

It claims to have launched denial of service attacks on several websites as a result, although it did not detail which ones.

The unspecified hacks formed part of a wave of security breaches that the group called Titanic Takeover Tuesday.

LulzSec has risen to prominence in recent months by attacking Sony, Nintendo and several US broadcasters.

The group publicised the telephone hotline on its Twitter feed.

Callers to the US number are met with a recorded message, in a heavy French accent, by an individual calling themself Pierre Dubois.

While the 614 area code appears to relate to the state of Ohio, it is unlikely that this is its real location.

Lulz Security said it had used distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) against eight sites suggested by callers.

It also claimed to have hit the websites of gaming magazine The Escapist, and multiplayer games EVE Online and League of Legends.

DDoS attacks typically involve crashing a website by inundating it with requests from computers under the attacker's control.

It is unclear, in this instance, if LulzSec went beyond overloading the sites and sought to gain access to information stored on their servers.

Protest groups

Little is known about Lulz Security, other than their apparent "hacktivist' motivation.

The organisations and companies that it targets are often portrayed as having acted against the interests of citizens or consumers.

Its high profile attack on SonyPictures.com exposed, Lulz claimed, the company's ongoing inability to secure users' personal data.

Along with Anonymous, LulzSec has raised the profile of hacker groups as a potential threat to online services.

Hacktivists see their role as staging valid protests in the most high profile way possible, according to Peter Wood, founder of security consultancy First Base.

"The things they are exploiting at the moment are the sort of mistakes that organisations seem to have been making ever since they connected to the internet.

"Finally there are some players out there who are using them as a means to protest. Whether everyone agrees with them is a different question."

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Google ramps up speed of search

15 June 2011 Last updated at 06:14 ET By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, Silicon Valley

Google has made changes to its search engine as it strives to get consumers the information they want faster.

Its new Instant Pages system will shave between two to five seconds off the time it takes for a web page to load, the company said.

It is also planning to offer voice-activated and enhanced image searching.

Google, which processes one billion requests every day, said search remained its core focus.

The firm still dominates the market although Microsoft's Bing is slowly eating into its share.

Bing's US searches rose to 14 percent in May from 12 percent at the end of 2010. It also powers searching on Yahoo, which has 15.9 percent of the market while Google's share slipped to 66 percent from 67 percent, according to measurement firm comScore

Instant Pages works by pre-loading the page associated with the top search result in the background as a user decides what to click on.

Google relies on its relevance technology to confidently predict the number one result a user will pick.

That means when the top pre-rendered link is chosen, the web page opens instantaneously.

The search giant said it typically takes around five seconds for a web page to launch once someone clicks on it.

"We at Google will not be happy until we make the Web as easy to flip through as a magazine," Google fellow Amit Singhal said at the Inside Search event in San Francisco.

"We are obsessed with speed. We often say speed is still the killer app," he added.

During a demo at the event the Washington Post home page loaded immediately with Instant Pages, compared to 3.2 seconds without it.

Last year the Silicon Valley firm introduced Google Instant which gives users results to queries while queries are being typed into the search box.

Positive impact

"What we have observed is that every time we shave 15 milliseconds from the speed, users search more and more, said Mr Singhal.

Over the next couple of weeks Instant Pages will be made available to users of Google's Chrome web browser.

The company said it would open access to the software code so other browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer could also incorporate the feature.

"Making it ubiquitous will make people go wow, Google just made the web faster," said Matt Rosoff, west coast editor of Business Insider.

"As far as Google is concerned it is another thing that will continue to draw people to Google and make sure they don't leave for another competitor like Microsoft."

Say it

On mobile, Google is offering an alternative to the traditional keyword search with icons linked to common searches such as restaurants, coffee shops and bars.

It said that the move was prompted by a rise in searches involving nearby places.

The company is also preparing to introduce voice-activated search for personal computers. The feature already exists on mobile devices.

The tool, represented by a small microphone icon in the far right of the Google search box, will appear over the coming days.

In a demonstration, reporters were shown that the search engine understands the difference between Worcester, Massachusetts, and Wooster College - words that sound the same but are spelt differently.

"Arguably speaking is the most natural way we learn to express our needs. It remains to be seen what kinds of usage scenarios may be important when it comes to the desktop. As the data comes in we will learn (that) over time," said Mike Cohen, manager of speech technology at Google.

According to Google, voice search traffic has grown six-fold over the past year, and every day users speak about two years' worth of speech into the system.

The company also revealed during its presentation that as many as 230 billion words a day are entered into the language bank system, helping to improve the way it deals with accents, pronunciations and colloquialisms.

The speech recognition tool will only be available on Google's Chrome web browser for now but executives said they hope other software makers would eventually implement the technology.

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