Anonymous protests SOPA, retaliates for Fed shutdown of MegaUpload: MPAA, RIAA, government sites knocked down
In the wake of the wide-ranging online protests by Wikipedia and others against US legislation measures such as the SOPA act, the US government took down the popular file-sharing website MegaUpload, as has been previously reported here in what could be described as a form of retaliation. Now, the hacker element known as Anonymous appears to have acted in response, in what may be its largest action to date.
Anonymous has announced via the AnonOps twitter account associated with the group that it and those within it have succeeded in knocking out some pretty significant websites, including those of the RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music Group, the record label BMI, the French copyright authority HADOPI and apparently the theUS Copyright Office, justice.gov and fbi.gov websites as well (though the latter seems to have gone back up). The attacks started immediately after the shutdown of megaupload.com, and seem to be of Distributed Denial-of-Service Attack (DDoS) nature - meaning that the computer servers of the websites in question were flooded until they collapsed, carried out via an application which has been freely distributed through online sources for years now.