Lulzsec Hacker Group: We Hacked The U.S. Senate

The famous hacker group Lulzsec, responsible for many of the most recent hacking incidents, have turned things up a notch or two as they attack the U.S. Senate website.

A cyber attack on the U.S. Senate website was reported in a Lulzsec post over the weekend. The hack was reportedly against the Senate's website and did not compromise any sensitive information. The server that Lulzsec broke into was one that already provided public information on the website but the U.S. Government is treating this as they would any real-world attack, something very serious.

Allegedly, the U.S. Senate confirmed that the website being hacked serves as only in inconvenience and nothing that would exploit sensitive data including user account data.

Lulzsec happily posts consistent updates on their website (lulzsec.com) and via their Twitter account (http://twitter.com/#!/LulzSec) for anyone looking to follow Lulzsec's every move. They even have a clever logo placed on their Twitter account shown in Figure 1. below.

Figure 1. - Lulzsec Twitter logo

Lulzsec, already responsible for several other hacking incidents in the past month, posted the following message on their website after the attack:

"We don't like the US government very much. Their boats are weak, their lulz are low, and their sites aren't very secure. In an attempt to help them fix their issues, we've decided to donate additional lulz in the form of owning them some more!
"This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov - is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?"

Could it be the Lulzsec group is toying with whomever they may have some type of discrepancy with or are they doing it for some future personal gain that we have not yet identified?

Lulzsec seems to be an extremely busy hacker group. Even still, they have recently attacked the games developer Bethesda Softworks in the same time frame as the Senate's website attack. Goes to show that these relentless hackers are not going to slow their 'efforts' any time soon.

We have noticed that authorities are cracking down on cybercrooks and hackers in recent events such as the case of a California Mac tech who was arrested for secretly installing webcam peeping software on women's computers. It is only a matter of time until Lulzsec gets caught if they keep toying with websites and networks.

What should the punishment of a prominent hacker group Lulzsec be if they are ever caught?