Operation Anti-Security: U.K. Serious Organised Crimes Agency and Census first victims of LulzSec hacking war

Codenamed Operation Anti-Security, LulzSec and Anonymous' new campaign against the world's governments today claimed its first victims, with LulzSec reportedly enacting successful cyber attacks against the U.K.'s Serious Organised Crimes Agency and Census.

The attack SOCA

The attack on SOCA was first revealed when a message up on the LulzSec's Twitter feed yesterday evening. The tweet read, "Tango down - http://t.co/JhcjgO9 - in the name of #AntiSec".

SOCA's website subsequently went down and was still down at the time this article was written. A subsequent post on LulzSec's Twitter page indicated that the group may well have targeted the site with a distributed denial of service cyber attack.

DDoS attacks overload websites and networks with requests to the point that they cease to function. Anonymous used the technique in its own campaign against the Turkish Government earlier this year.

A youth has since been arrested for involvement in the attack.

The Census hack

The hack on the U.K. Census was reported today after LulzSec posted a statement on the Pastebin website.

The post claimed, "We [LulzSec] have blissfully obtained records of every single citizen who gave their records to the security-illiterate UK government for the 2011 census".

The group went on to promise that it would release the information stolen after it had prepared it for publication, "We're keeping them under lock and key though... so don't worry about your privacy (...until we finish re-formatting them for release)".

The authenticity of LulzSec's claimed attack on the Census database is yet to be verified.

UPDATE: LulzSec has since denied responsibility for any involvement in the attack on the census' database.