Photo by wizzer2801

Last week’s cyberattacks that brought down D.C. government websites for the better part of a day have continued, with hackers again briefly overwhelming the DC.gov website last night.

Over the weekend the hackers—which also posted information about Mayor Vince Gray, including what they claimed was his Social Security number—expanded their portfolio of attacks, taking down the website of the State of Washington. All told, they’ve attacked NYC.gov, Military.com, DC.gov, and Nasdaq.com over the last week.

According to the Examiner, the attacks—known as distributed denial of service attacks, which overwhelm servers with traffic—aren’t the height of computer hacking, but they’re effective enough:

“It’s not necessarily the most complex attack to engage in from an attacker perspective, but from a victim perspective, it’s devastating,” said Dave Marcus, the director of security research for anti-virus software maker McAfee Labs. “This type of attack is just exceptionally difficult to really protect yourself against.”

Although District officials have declined to elaborate about their response to the attack, Marcus said the city is likely reviewing forensic evidence that would help experts track down the culprits and repair any computer system weaknesses.

One of the hackers responsible for the attacks last week told us he was based in Staten Island and that his group, known as the UGNazi collective, was protesting government policies towards the Internet.

Apologies that my public sched not available online due to ongoing attack on DC.gov, but we are getting the problems fixed.

— Vincent C. Gray (@mayorvincegray) April 23, 2012