SOCA got hit by Lulzsec

THE LONG ARM of the shadowy ninja pirate organisation Lulzsec has reached out and throttled the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) web site.

The web site was down late on Monday and SOCA confirmed in a statement that it had been the victim of a denial of service attack.

"Soca has chosen to take its website offline to limit the impact of DDoS attack on other clients hosted by our service provider," it said before adding that no "operational material" was compromised.

"The Soca website is a source of information for the general public which is hosted by an external provider. It is not linked to our operational material or the data we hold."

Lulzsec has posted its own conformation of the attack, tweeting, "Tango down - Soca.gov.uk - in the name of #AntiSec".

The SOCA web site might not have been down for everyone, though, and in a later post Lulzsec added, "Later we'll unleash fire on multiple targets. That last one is down depending on which area you're from. Lulz Cannon is being upgraded." Then later, "DDoS is of course our least powerful and most abundant ammunition."

Lulzsec is expected to release the fruits of yesterday's labours today, and no doubt a number of government, military and security bodies will be waiting with baited breath to see what it coughs up.

"Our next step is to categorize and format leaked items we acquire and release them in #AntiSec 'payloads' on our website and The Pirate Bay", it revealed in its most recent tweet. µ