In an email sent to and other news organizations, because of its support for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).

CISPA, which was , would give companies immunity from lawsuits and prosecution in passing customer information to the government, if the data was necessary to maintain cybersecurity or national security. The legislation is .

UGNazi taking credit for an attack it may not have committed is not unusual in the twisted hactivist world. "Hacking groups, like terrorists, have claimed responsibility for random events for a very long time," Wisniewski said. "I think they expect it to boost their cred in the community, if they are perceived to be so powerful that they can impact major players in the Web 2.0 space."

During the six months before the outage, Twitter had its "highest marks for site reliability and stability ever," said Rawashdeh. On average, the site had been running normally for all but roughly 20 seconds in a 24-hour period.

in CSOonline's Malware/Cybercrime section.