Photo by wizzer2801

A concerted denial of service attack on D.C. government servers today largely rendered a number of websites from the mayor’s homepage to the D.C. Department of Transportation unusable, and the hacker responsible for them says there are more to come.

A Staten Island-based hacker affiliated with the UGNazi group and going by the name Cosmo told us via email that the attacks were part of a protest against the government.

“We our attacking dc.gov because the way the government treats the internet,” he wrote in an email. “It seems is if they don’t care about our input and for that they will pay. We were sending various attacks via Botnet to make the servers crash. We will be launching future attacks on DC.gov and various DC and government websites.”

According to him, the group also attacked NYC.gov and Military.com as part of their protest. New York City officials confirmed the attack, which took place on Tuesday and last some two-and-a-half hours. A spokesman said they were “working with the NYPD to identify those responsible for this attack, and we are monitoring site traffic in an effort to prevent future outages.”

Confusion remained as to whether the attack was intended against the District’s local government or should have been aimed at the federal government that occupies the same geographic space, though. While Cosmo wrote that “the attack was intended straight towards D.C.,” an earlier statement published by Softpedia said that “[t]he capital of US is in DC,” hinting that the group make have gone after the smaller of the two governments in the city.

In January the group launched a similar attack against the UFC for its support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act that was debated by Congress earlier this year. DDoS attacks have been launched by a variety of groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec against federal government websites and servers, including the FBI and CIA.

This morning’s attack not only affected government websites, but also email access for some employees and regular function at agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles. Pedro Ribeiro, a spokesman for Mayor Vince Gray, said that the city was “working with its federal partners and vendors to mitigate any effects from the attack.” He also stressed that while the DDoS attack may have taken some websites offline, government services remained largely unaffected, including 311, phones and most email.