Notorious hacking group Lizard Squad is back in the news with reports that they managed to take down a United Kingdom law enforcement site.

Described by some as a hack, the group appears to have launched a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) attack against the website of the National Crime Authority (NCA), the U.K.’s lead agency against organized crime; human, weapon and drug trafficking; cyber crime; and economic crime that goes across regional and international borders.

The inclusion of cyber crime in its purview isn’t incidental with the NCA being the lead investigative authority in the U.K. into Lizard Squad’s activities, including the arrest of six teenagers for allegedly employing a tool sold by Lizard Squad called the “Lizard Stresser” against at least three major corporate websites in late August.

Reports are not entirely clear, but it would appear the NCA site was offline for at least a couple of hours, and with no great sense of irony were more than likely targeted by Squad members using Lizard Stresser against it.

The NCA was at pains to note that it had not been hacked, explaining to The Guardian what had occurred:

The NCA website is an attractive target. Attacks on it are a fact of life.

DDoS is a blunt form of attack which takes volume and not skill. It isn’t a security breach, and it doesn’t affect our operational capability.

At worst it is a temporary inconvenience to users of our website. We have a duty to balance the value of keeping our website accessible with the cost of doing so, especially in the face of a threat which can scale up endlessly.

The measures we have in place at present mean that our site is generally up and running again within 30 minutes, though occasionally it can take longer. We think that’s proportionate.

Lizard Squad formally accepted responsibility to the DDoS attack via their Twitter account where they posted the words “Stressed Out?” followed by a linked to the NCA website and the hashtag #offline.

The new attack is yet another to add to the long list of sites and people targeted by the group; previous targets have included the Chief Executive Office of Daybreak Games, Lenovo, Taylor Swift, Malaysian Airlines, and of course their notorious take-down of XBox Live and the Playstation Network last Christmas, to name but a few.

Image credit: Lizard Squad/ Twitter