Late this afternoon hackers identifying themselves as members of various Anonymous groups attacked and disabled the website for the US Justice Department, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America. The move came after the FBI raided the popular file sharing site Megaupload earlier today and arrested 7 of its operators.It appears that the FBI may be the next target of the hackers.
Important Clarification: I want to point out that, at least so far, these have been Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, which essentially flood a website’s server by having many user flood the site at the same time. It is actually a bit more complicated than that; please look here if you want to see how it works. These attacks do not allow hackers access to the files or protected information on a site, they just make it inaccessible.
Update: It now appears that US Copyright Office’s site is also down.
And so is the site for Universal Music.
LulzOps an Anon group is claiming that 5000 people participated in the attack.
It looks like the FBI is the next target.
By the way, YourAnonNews is actually probably the best Twitter account to follow if you want to watch how this progresses.
BMI, Warner Music Group, and Capital Records websites have all been targeted and are offline.
7:45 pm EST: The FBI website is down. Ironically, the site put up for people to report the status of the target sites in overloaded from too much traffic and is also down.
