LulzSec cyber attack on U.S. CIA possible hoax

Since claiming responsibility for a successful cyber attack on the U.S. CIA's website the hacker collective LulzSec has since tweeted that not all comments made on its Twitter page are official statements for the group, leading to speculation about the authenticity of its most recent claim.

The claim

After claiming a successful cyber attack against the U.S. Senate's public website earlier this week LulzSec has since claimed responsibility for a new attack against the CIA.'s website.

LulzSec claimed responsibility for the attack via a tweet on its Twitter page. The tweet claimed that LulzSec had managed to bring down the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's website.

The Tweet read, "Tango down - cia.gov - for the lulz". A subsequent tweet posted later in the evening elaborated, "Goodnight twitter. The CIA anti-lizards will probably rise from the packet sea while we rest our shining-yet-saturated power field arrays."

Can it be trusted?

Since the initial tweet went out, LulzSec today posted two new tweets indicating that the media should take any statements made on its Twitter page with a pinch of salt:

"@AlexGaddafi The fact that you succumb to the fear of other humans making rules for you shows that you've never experienced "freedom"."

Followed by, "@AlexGaddafi You're probably going to be on the news now because media likes treating our tweets as official statements. :D Say cheese!"

While parts of the CIA's website were down on Wednesday, certain analysts and experts have already speculated that this could have been a knock on effect of the increased number of users trying to log on to it to check LulzSec's claims.

Additionally the CIA has not yet confirmed whether an actual cyber attack did occur. Thus far all the agency has revealed is that it is "looking into" LulzSec's claims.

For these reasons -- adding to the question of whether the claims of a group that describes itself as a group of "pirate ninjas" can be trusted in the first place -- it certainly isn't beyond the realms of possibility that LulzSec simply double-bluffed the world, just to see what would happen.