U.K. National Crime Agency under DDOS Attack as Protest from Lizard Squad

A massive Distributed Denial of Service attack by hacker group Lizard Squad has affected daily operations of the U.K.’s National Crime Agency website.

The hackers posted on Twitter the message “Stressed out” and a URL to the agency’s website. The attack was likely triggered by the arrest of six teenagers, days earlier, on accusations of using denial of service tools to perform similar attacks on various websites. In an operation codenamed Vivarium, the teenagers were charged with using Lizard Stresser – a tool developed by Lizard team – to bombard websites with bogus traffic.

The official National Crime Agency statement dismisses the incident as having significant impact on their security infrastructure, classifying it as “a temporary inconvenience to users of our website.”

“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,” said the NCA in a statement. “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.”

The hacking team Lizard Squad has also claimed responsibility for disrupting Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation online services during Christmas day in 2014. Following this recent attack on NCA, they’ve claimed to “start operations back up again,” which probably means they’ll disrupt other online services in the near future.