Columbia officials investigate hacker attack

COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Columbia officials have talked to the FBI after a hacker attack shut down the city's website.

Deputy city manager Tony St. Romaine says an online post said the group Anonymous was taking credit for the attack. But he told the Columbia Tribune he can't be certain the loosely organized network of activist hackers is to blame.

The online post in the Counter Current News said Columbia's website was targeted after the hackers learned of a video of a February 2010 SWAT team raid of a man's home. The SWAT team found a misdemeanor amount of marijuana and shot two dogs in the home, killing one. Release of the video sparked outrage and spurred changes in police policies and procedures.

The Anonymous Press Twitter feed also links to the Counter Current News site.

Joel Sealer, a spokesman for the FBI in Kansas City, said only that city officials had been in contact with the agency, but he would not comment on any investigation or confirm there is an investigation.

St. Romaine said city information technologies staff members were alerted around 11 p.m. Wednesday to what is known as a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack on the city website at gocolumbiamo.com. He said network security issued an alert that the site was under attack. The attack flooded the website server with requests from multiple sources.

St. Romaine said no damage to the city's systems was expected, because the attack wasn't designed to remove or destroy data. St. Romaine said the city's network security protects it from hacks and viruses and other malicious attacks, but there is no real protection from a DDOS attack, which seek to shut down sites.