The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) trade group suffered a massive DDoS attack that crippled the copyright group’s website for a few hours.
The attack was part of “Operation Payback” and the hackers also reportedly took down Netregistry, the AFACT’s host, as a side effect. Netregistry is responsible for providing hosting services to approximately 8,000 websites. Some Australian government websites were also affected, with administrators noting website downtime, e-mail timeouts, and admin control access limited.

“A DDoS attack began to take place at approximately 8:30AM AEST, with a group of hackers attacking the firewall by flooding it with connections attempting to take down all servers,” the AFACT group said in a recent statement. “They had achieved success in disabling all access to some of the client facing services behind the firewall.”
The AFACT website was down for 4 hours and 27 minutes — from three separate attacks — according to Panda Security, which has observed DDoS attacks against numerous targets as part of Operation Payback.
The 4chan group is reportedly behind this latest attack as well, with future DDoS attacks expected in the near future.
The RIAA and MPAA recently had their websites attacked by the 4chan group that also targeted the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and several other high-profile anti-piracy websites. The most significant attack has been against the anti-piracy firm ACS: Law, which had critical e-mail and other information leaked, which could cause irreparable harm to the company.
It’s not uncommon to hear copyright groups suffering hacking attacks — and occasionally have their websites defaced — but these recent attacks that caused downtime for 8,000 unrelated sites are going over the line. ACS: Law is angry about the e-mails being published online, and at least one company official has received harassing phone calls at home.
3 Comments
|
I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is cyber-terrorism. Who would have ever thought that that term could ever come into use?
|
Freedom fighter or Rebel terrorist? It's all a matter of perspective.
About this category
Piracy
- The constant fight against, or enjoyment of pirated movies, music and games: this news covers all that is piracy related, such as lawsuits and P2P services.More about this
Music
- Digital Right Management (DRM), illegal and legal music downloads, the comeback of vinyl, the end of CDs and everything else on music is covered this category.More about this
Most popular headlines
Diablo 3 game fans hit with always-online DRM grief (4)
- Fri 18 May 20:04 by Seán
- Software
it appears that Blizzard underestimated the server capacity required to handle all the gamers, thus resulting in Battle.net servers being overloaded and taken offline at launch. As Diablo III requires the user to be logged in with an uninterrupted internet connection to play, most players were greeted with an "Error 37" on the day of launch, unable to play the game.
CD Projekt says the truth is, DRM doesn't work (2)
- Mon 21 May 22:48 by Seán
- Piracy
In an interview between Forbes and CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski, Iwinski said the truth is that DRM simply does not work. He said the main problem is that the copy protection is cracked within hours of the release of every game, not to mention the money and development wasted to implement it. Those with pirated versions also have a clean and more functional game!
Why not? PNY announces USB drive with whistle (10)
- Wed 23 May 11:48 by DoMiN8ToR
- Uncategorized
It could be possible that there is a scenario where you would have loved to be able to whistle on your USB stick, but we really wonder when. To make
FBI to start special service to spy on online communication (1)
- Thu 24 May 10:11 by DoMiN8ToR
- Computers
Cnet claims that the FBI, the intellige


