On Last Friday, the authorities of DOJ Department of Justice had officially shut down Megaupload site, a popular file sharing site which is also an online Hong Kong based company established in 2005 ran a number of online services related to files storage and viewing was siezed and shut down by the U.S. Justice Department on 19 January 2012, following indictment and arrests of the owners for operation an organization dedicated to copyright infrigement.HK$330 million-worth assets were frozen by the Customs and Excise Department of Hong Kong.
This shutdown lead to denial-of-service attacks by anonymous hackers to the U.S. Government website DOJ. The hacking group Anonymous umbrage to the take down of Megaupload by the Department of Justice so much so they take down the DOJ site in retaliation. They seem unhappy by the act of DOJ taking down Megaupload.com
The Department of Justice site http://www.justice.gov has been slow since the announcement about Megaupload became public, but it has been up and down ever since, pointing to a potential DDoS attack of some sort.
According to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com, several websites are out of commission as of this writing, likely thanks to DDoS attacks: the U.S. Department of Justice (doj.gov, justice.gov), the U.S. Copyright Office, Universal Music Group, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
At about 2 p.m. on Thursday, @AnonDaily, a Twitter account assumed to be associated with Anonymous: https://twitter.com/AnonDaily , tweeted:
“TANGO DOWN! JUSTICE.gov – U.S. Government Website DOWN!” The account has continued to post updates, noting that RIAA, MPAA, Universal Music Group, and U.S. Copyright Office websites were all down, and that Anonymous is trying to knock out several other websites, including the FBI and White House websites.
Other offline websites included:
- U.S. Department of Justice
- U.S. Copyright Office
- Recording Industry Association of America
- Motion Picture Association of America
- Universal Music Group
- BMI Music
According to one hacker, who said they launched the operation because:
“Taking down megaupload was another bad attempt at fighting piracy. Putting a webmaster in jail because the users of his website posted copyrighted material is outrageous. … [Thanks to SOPA and PIPA,] a lot of people really fear the end of the internet as we know it … They cannot ignore us now.
Megaupload founder Kim Schmitz also known as Kim Dotcom and its’ members are preparing to defend against the accusations that it is a massive criminal enterprise.
Megaupload defendants Bram van der Kolk (Bramos), Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann, and Kim Dotcom
His defenders are saying that shutting down Megaupload for hosting some pirated content would be like shutting down YouTube for the same reasons.