Anonymous, the group of hacktivists from 4chan’s /b/ board, brought down the websites of the Department of Justice, Universal Music, RIAA, and MPAA (among many others). First of all, I don’t think people realize that bringing down a website is sort of like covering up a billboard, so there’s no need to overreact like some people who think that all of their personal information is compromised every day. Second of all, I love those guys. It’s great to see that the guys (and femanons) who made PedoBear famous are actually using their powers for good.
Their DDoS attack was in direct response to the federal government shutting down MegaUpload, a website where we were all able to pirate movies and music for free, because there was no way I was going to pay for Common’s last album. And guess what? You might’ve have helped them execute it. Gawker’s Adrian Chen explains:
Anonymous members are distributing a link that ropes internet users into an illegal DDoS attack against these websites simply by clicking it.
…
The link is a page on the anonymous web hosting site pastehtml. It link loads a web-based version of the program Anonymous has used for years to DDoS websites: Low Orbit Ion Cannon. (LOIC). LOIC rapidly reloads a target website, and if enough users point LOIC at a site at once, it can crash from the traffic.
Since they see the shutdown of MegaUpload as the greatest government attack on the Internet ever, they’re not going to give up so easily. They claim to have even more websites planned for attack soon, but for now I’m going to keep lurking on /b/. There’s some funny stuff on there. Until then, you can check out Anonymous’ statement regarding the attacks (including MPAA CEO Chris Dodd’s sensitive personal information).
