NSA.gov down, denial

53 minutes ago

The official website of the National Security Agency, NSA.gov, is offline and has been for several hours. Not only that, but the rumor being jubilantly spread around the net is that it is a deliberate denial-of-service attack.

Downtime-tracking service Isitdownrightnow.com reports that the site has been unavailable since about 2 p.m. ET.

Large government webpages don't tend to go down for hours for no reason, but it has not been confirmed yet whether this is an attack or simply a technical problem. Some Twitter accounts claiming to be associated with the loosely-organized hacker group Anonymous have claimed responsibility, but those claims only appeared after the site had been down for several hours.

That the website is unavailable does not mean that the NSA is unable to perform its usual functions; NSA.gov is, like Army.gov and Senate.gov, primarily an informational site for anyone wishing to learn about or contact the agency. Taking it down certainly would serve as a very visible protest (which is how it is being characterized), but the website is not the agency itself, and none of the networks or tools the NSA uses would be hosted or accessible via NSA.gov.

Distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attacks target the public-facing servers of websites, hammering them with requests and overloading their ability to function as normal. Often many computers are needed to produce the requisite amount of traffic, hence 'distributed' - though not as many are necessary now, owing to improvements to the tools used by hackers.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.