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Anonymous 'goes nuclear' in Megaupload revenge attack
But has the hacker collective played into the hands of the entertainment industry they so despise?
THE SHADOWY Anonymous collective is congratulating itself this morning after a "thermo-nuclear" hacking operation which took down a host of US government and entertainment websites overnight in revenge for the closure by authorities of file-sharing site Megaupload.
But cooler heads are warning yesterday's attacks might have destroyed in one fell swoop public support for the 'blackout' campaign against two restrictive new anti-piracy laws being debated in Congress.
CNN reports that Megaupload is accused of "massive worldwide online piracy of copyrighted works" costing the entertainment industry $500m in lost revenue. The US Justice Department said yesterday that 20 search warrants had been executed in eight countries and that approximately $50m in assets had been seized. Megaupload's co-founders Kim 'Dotcom' Schmitz and Mathias Ortmann were arrested in Auckland, New Zealand.
US authorities were investigating the company, which was founded in 2005 and accounted for four per cent of global internet traffic, because it had servers in Virginia and Washington.
The closure of Megaupload prompted Anonymous, a loose collective of hackers that has in the past targeted the websites of those it believes threaten the freedom of the internet, to launch its biggest and most effective denial of service (DDoS) attack yet.
Gawker reports that Anonymous used an "evil new tactic". Hackers distributed a link via Twitter and chat rooms which, when clicked by an unsuspecting user, launches a weapon called 'Low Orbit Ion Cannon', which opens a window that rapidly reloads a target website.
If a target website receives too many requests, it will effectively go down. Companies affected overnight included the FBI, Department of Justice, music licensing group BMI, Universal Music and the Motion Picture Association of America.
Early this morning, AnonDaily, a Twitter account apparently affiliated with Anonymous, was in self-congratulatory mood: "Today was amazing. We changed the internet forever. Thank you."
CNet's Molly Wood said Anonymous had "gone nuclear" and that watching a global map of internet attack traffic was like watching the 1980s film War Games "but with cyber-bombs".
However, she warned of dire consequences for the fight against restrictive internet legislation.
The day before Megaupload was raided, the fight against two anti-piracy Acts called SOPA and PIPA had been all-but won following a 'blackout' protest by sites such as Wikipedia and Google which prompted several senators who had co-sponsored PIPA to withdraw their support.
Wood says Anonymous has "nuked" the public goodwill amassed by opponents of the act and she asks whether the hackers hadn't "been played" by the authorities.
"My sources tell me the timing of the Megaupload arrests was no accident,” says Wood. “The federal government, they say, was spoiling for a fight after the apparent defeat of SOPA/PIPA... And what better way to bolster the cause for cyber-crackdown than by pointing to a massive display of cyber-terrorism at the hands of everyone's favorite internet boogeyman: Anonymous?" ·
