In response to both the takedown of Megaupload today and the SOPA/PIPA bills that are being mulled over in the United states the hacktavist group Anonymous has responded by taking down several websites with a distributed denial of service attack. Both the Universal Music and American Department of Justice websites were taken offline by the attack.
4chan, the ‘homebase’ of anonymous is in frenzy over closure of one of “their sites” and are seeking revenge with LOIS, an open source DDoS ableing software. Some of the anons have posted a Javascript version of the tool to help the effort, it’s available on pastebin. The next plausible targets seems to be the FBI site or the RIAA website as many lasers are already “pointed” at them.
That said, even when the number of LOIC attackers is high, it still would not be enough to take down these types of high profile websites. Anynymous must have access to a bot net and/or is pooling resources with other groups to carry out and sustain such effective attacks.
Anonymous Takedown Catalogue
Updated as of 8:00PM EST January 22 2011
Most Site are now back up and running but, with fewer numbers, the attack continues on a few sites. The Brazilian arm of anonymous seems to still be hard at work. They are continuing the DDoS on a broad spectrum of websites, the hit list of 114 websites all with .br TDLs has been posted on pastebin. We’ve included some of the most notable downed sites on the list below.
- CBS Anonymous deleted the entire site directory taking it down for a few hours until it was restored from a backup.
- Universal Music BrazilDown under DDoS attack
- Visa Brazil Down under DDoS attack
- Anti-Piracy Belgium
- New Zealand Justice Department
- MGM Shop Down, under DDoS attack
- Warner Brothers Store Down, under DDoS attack
- Warner Music GroupDown, under DDoS attack
- BMI Down, under DDoS attack
- US Department of Justice
- Universal Music Down, still under DDoS attack
- Recording Industry of America
- MPAA
- FBI
