Office of National Statistics fears census hack

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has been investigating claims that a hacker group has broken into its systems and obtained data from the national census, reports The Register . The ONS and Lockheed Martin, its contractor for the census, were reported to be checking for evidence that LulzSec had obtained the records, which were taken from 25 million UK households in March. This followed an announcement on the Pastebin website that the group had obtained the records. The ONS said it was aware of the announcement and was investigating, but at the time had no evidence that it had been compromised. Hours earlier, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was forced to take its website offline after a distributed denial of service attack by LulzSec. The website was back in service by late on Tuesday morning. The Guardian reports that soon after the attack LulzSec warned it would hack into more government websites and steal confidential documents. "Our next step is categorise and format leaked items we acquire and release them in #AntiSec 'payloads' on our website and The Pirate Bay," the group posted on Twitter. Soca issued a statement saying: "The Soca website has been reactivated this morning. Soca chose to take its website offline temporarily last night to limit the impact of the distributed denial of service attack on other clients hosted by our service provider. The Soca website only contains publicly available information and does not provide access to Soca's operational material or data." This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates of news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here .