Megaupload.com Taken Down For Piracy, Anonymous Retaliates with DDoS Attacks

Megaupload.com was shutdown, and founder Kim Dotcom was arrested along with three employees. U.S. officials claim that last year Kim Dotcom earned $42 million, while costing copyright holders  $500,000,000 (yeah, 500 MILLION dollars). I’m not supporting infringement or stealing, but the last time I checked, movie stars and the agencies behind them don’t look to be hurting for cash – duplicating isn’t stealing, it’s duplicating..

The EFF and others have raised serious concerns because U.S. Authorities have arrested a Dutch citizen living in New Zealand for violating U.S. copyright infringement laws. U.S. officials claim that some of the copyrighted material was hosted on servers in Virginia, which is grounds, they say, to justify the arrests. Despite rejections from their legal team, Kim Dotcom and the employees of Megaupload.com have allowed press to photograph and tape them, stating they have nothing to hide.

The news was followed up almost immediately by a massive Distributed Denial of Service attack on websites of the U.S. Department of Justice, the FBI, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Universal Music. The Anonymous collective is taking claim for the attack, which is already being called one of the largest to date. At the time of this writing, all but the Universal Music site are no longer down, and I was unable to grab screen shots of the other sites in time.

What makes this attack particularly fascinating is that it is being distributed via web-pages as a client-side browser-based attack. By loading the page, anyone can participate in the attack, even without knowing, contributing their bandwidth and resources to flooding the target with endless bad requests. Too many of these requests will overload the server, rendering it unable to respond to valid requests from legitimate users. In addition, the attack uses a hive-mind approach, allowing coordinators to specify the target that the arsenal of attackers collectively focuses on.