If you haven’t been able to log onto a DC.gov website today, there’s a good reason—the city’s websites have been subjected to a distributed denial of service attack, overwhelming servers with requests and making government websites either extremely slow or simply impossible to load.

We were able to confirm with the D.C. Office of the Chief Technology Officer that the DDoS attack was ongoing, but Softpedia got all the gory details:

Hackers part of the UGNazi collective, the ones who yesterday attacked the site of New York City, keeping it offline for close to an hour, return. Today, they target not only the site of New York City (nyc.gov), but also the one of the Government of the District of Columbia (dc.gov).

Both sites, dc.gov and nyc.gov, have been down for several hours.

As we suspected yesterday, these aren’t distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks launched simply for “the lulz.” Instead, they are a form of protest against the US government.

“The capital of US is in DC. Seems the government doesn’t care about what we think about. The best place to hit them is at there heart,” one of the hackers told us, referring to the attack on dc.gov.

“We will also be launching more attacks on other government websites,” Cosmo added.

The hackers might be crafty, but they don’t seem to know the difference between Washington and D.C. We’re not sure that the federal government is exactly quivering in its boots over a DDoS attack on D.C. government websites, after all. (We have no voting rights, and now no Internet access to local government websites. C’mon, people!)

We have a call in with OCTO and will update once we get more details.

UPDATE, 1:25 p.m.: Not all DC.gov websites are being affected in the same way, it seems. The DMV site loaded just fine, but the main DC.gov and Department of Transportation sites won’t load at all.

UPDATE, 1:36 p.m.: DC.gov seems to have come back online.

Filed Under: attack, dc.gov, ddos, hackers, OCTO, websites,