US Senate has been hacked by Lulz Security

The hacking group LulzSec have added Senate.gov to the growing list of organizations whose websites they’ve breached just for the heck of it, including Sony, Fox.com, FBI affiliate Infragard and a porn site. Last night the group released a long list of internal configuration data from the U.S. Senate’s official website, Senate.gov — while none of it appeared to be sensitive, the group appeared to want to show that it could breach the Senate’s computer network.

In a statement LulzSec said: “This is a small, just-for-kicks release of some internal data from Senate.gov – is this an act of war, gentlemen? Problem?” The group’s question refers to recent reports that the U.S. military would respond to cyber attacks against the United States with military force.

The Senate’s deputy sergeant at arms Martina Bradford confirmed to Reuters that LulzSec had broken into a public portion of the Senate site but did not get through a firewall into a more sensitive portion of the network. The hackers also did not compromise any individual senator’s information. “We were responding to their allegations,” Bradford told Reuters. “Basically what we’re saying that the server they got into is for public access and is in the public side.”

“We don’t like the US government very much,” the hacker group which also calls itself The Lulz Boat said. “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!”

The Senate wasn’t LulzSec’s only target–the group also announced a more serious attack against Bethesda Softworks, the Maryland-based game maker behind Brink, yesterday. The group said in a separate statement that it had mapped the company’s internal network and “grabbed all their source code and database passwords, which we proceeded to shift silently back to our storage deck,”Lulzsec said.

The group added they had obtained usernames and passwords for 200,000 gamers but would not publish them. “We actually like this company and would like for them to speed up the production of Skyrim, so we’ll give them one less thing to worry about. You’re welcome!”