There are a number of US government branches, offices, and agencies that, by their very nature, have giant targets painted on their computer networks. America’s national library would not seem to be among that lot, but alas, not even the Library of Congress could escape the ire of hackers this year. BlitzSec, a lesser-known hacker group, said it used a SQL injection attack to compromise the Library of Congress’s networks and expose user names, passwords and email addresses. Why, you ask, would BlitzSec want to attack the seemingly benign national library? Well, in a statement on Pastebin, BlitzSec claimed that they launched the attack to send a message to the “criminals” and “terrorists” in the already unpopular U.S. Congress, particularly for its passage of various controversial pieces of legislation, namely the Patriot Act and the National Defense Authorization Act.
(Image via chriswatkins‘ Flickr photostream, Creative Commons)
