US Senate hacked for a second time

Despite a recent order for a security review, the US Senate’s public website has been hacked for the second time in one week.

“We’ve been able to stay ahead of the hackers and keep them out of the main Senate network,” Deputy Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Martina Bradford said, adding that the loosely-organized hacker group Lulz Security was not able to access sensitive data in the internal portion of the US legislature.

The US Senate’s website was compromised over the weekend as well, prompting officials to order a security review of the website. The attack was announced in a tweet on Monday.

Lulz publicly announced the attack, boasting that it had broken into the Senate’s public sites “for fun” and had also posted some legislative files on line.

The attacks follow the International Monetary Fund’s announcement that it had also been the victim of a string of cyber attacks.

The wave of such hacking efforts coincides with a recent announcement by US officials, seeking to classify cyber attacks as an act of war, which would allow them to use military force to retaliate against potential perpetrators.

Retired US air force colonel and a former Pentagon official Dr. Karen Kwiatkowski spoke against such plans by US authorities in a Press TV interview earlier this month. She emphasized that the idea was “a pretext designed for an ability to attack without really having a justifiable reason and also a misunderstanding of the nature of the internet.”

The IMF, Google, Citigroup, and Lockheed Martin have been some of the recent targets of hackers.