Just minutes after the U.S. Department of Justice repossessed the domains of Megaupload, Megavideo, Megaporn and a collection of other popular filesharing sites, the hacker collective Anonymous got to work on a few takedowns of its own.
On Thursday afternoon, Anonymous claimed credit for cyberattacks that knocked offline the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, Recording Industry of America, Motion Picture Association of America and Universal Music. The so-called denial of service attacks that overwhelmed those sites with junk traffic came less than an hour after the Justice Department announced the takedown of the Mega sites, along with the arrest of former hacker and Mega founder Kim Dotcom and six others, who are being indicted on charges of copyright infringement and money laundering.
“One thing is certain: EXPECT US!,” wrote the Anonymous-linked Anonops Twitter feed Thursday just after the Mega raid, adding a hashtag for Megaupload.
“Anonymous/Megaupload backlash update:
RIAA - Recording Industry Association of America is now Tango Down,” wrote the Twitter feed Anonnews less than one hour later, as other Anonymous feeds claimed credit for downing Justice.gov and Universalmusic.com.
Update: The U.S. Copyright office website is now down as well. Expect this to go on for a while. “Get some popcorn… it’s going to be a long lulzy night,” writes Anonnews.
Anonnews also now calls the operation the largest ever that Anonymous has undertaken in terms of participants, with 5,635 computers running the distributed attack software that the hacker group uses.
The raid on the Mega sites, which were massively popular among Anonymous’ young, copyright-flouting contingent of the Web, come just as the Internet is mobilized for protest against Hollywood’s copyright regime. Wednesday marked a largely successful day of protest against the copyright-enforcing Stop Online Piracy and the Protect IP Act, with Reddit, Wikipedia and other popular sites going dark in protest of the bills. The Department of Justice’s raid on the Mega sites just a day later must seem to many in the anti-copyright movement as a retaliatory move aimed at showing that even without SOPA or PIPA, law enforcement can take action against sites that Hollywood accuses of copyright infringement.
Universal Music, for its part, added itself to Anonymous’ target list in a recent legal spat with the Mega sites. After Mega’s recently appointed chief executive officer and hip hop producer Swizz Beatz assembled a team of celebrities including Kanye West, Will.i.am, Alicia Keyes and others to appear in a promotional video for the company, Universal issued a takedown notice to YouTube. Despite not owning the rights to the song, YouTube nonetheless removed the video, sparking a lawsuit from Mega.
With Mega’s execs now detained in New Zealand and likely awaiting extradition to the U.S., the sites seem to have become rallying point for Anonymous’ anti-copyright activists. “Support [The Pirate Bay], Torrents, Magnets, Megaupload and its alternatives. Support file-sharing. Legal or not. It is our right,” wrote one prominent hacker within Anonymous who goes by the name Sabu, in the midst of a string of tweets calling for a boycott of Hollywood and record labels. ”The entertainment industries will see that they can not simply censor us for the basis of profit.”
