In February, when the Pirate Bay trial was in full swing, a group of hackers managed to deface the Swedish IFPI site. Today, the international IFPI site is the new target and is suffering from a DDoS attack. At the time of writing the website is completely inaccessible.

The attacks are part of Operation Baylout which also encourages people to send black faxes to the MPAA’s anti-piracy office and movie industry lawyer Monique Wadsted. Thus far, we have no confirmation that any fax machines have been taken down.

The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment: “I feel peoples’ frustration. I hope they do something more permanent instead, like making sure the idiots that give power to the media industry lose their own power. We need to cut out the companies abusing copyright at the expense of society’s well-being. But this is not a permanent fix so it’s just pointless.”

Pointless or not, according to the Reg, some 250 hackers are gathering in AnonNet’s IRC channels to discuss their battle strategies and future plans.

Mooncup, one of the root administrators at AnonNet confirmed this and told TorrentFreak: “They seem to be doing it to demonstrate to the record industry that the Internet is our domain and they can keep the fuck out of our business or face the consequences,” he explained.

“They [IFPI] represent most of the record companies, therefore attacking them represents an attack on all of the people who try to stop websites like The Pirate Bay without really understanding what they are really about,” Mooncus added, noting that AnonNet itself is by no means involved in the attacks.

IFPI was contacted for a response, but we haven’t heard back from them at the time of publication.

Update: IFPI.se is also down.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Mininova co-founder Niek confirmed to TorrentFreak that they have been suffering from a DDoS attack over the past few days. The site is currently being pounded by a botnet of hundreds of computers which is slowing the site down significantly and at times making it completely inaccessible.

Niek said that he has no idea who’s behind the attack or why they chose to target Mininova. This is not the first time the site has had to deal with a Denial of Service attack, but they haven’t witnessed one of this magnitude before.

It started on Thursday originating from three different continents, but seemed to wear off in the hours that followed. Today it’s back in full force. Mininova is used to serving millions of visitors a day, but even they are not equipped to handle an attack like this.

Today’s attack originates from Germany and Argentina and is 2 Gbit strong. The DDoS attack is maxing out the entire uplink and is hard to filter since it uses UDP connections.

Niek told TorrentFreak that they are working on a solution at the moment, and he hopes things will be back to normal soon.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

“We will continue our efforts to bring down Scientology, but we need the help and support of another Freedom fighting community, the pirates.” one of Anonymous’ members told TorrentFreak, and the group gave us the opportunity to ask a couple of more questions.

TorrentFreak: Can you briefly describe what “Project Chanology” is?

Anonymous: Project Chanology is the project to bring down Scientology. Nothing more, nothing less. Why that name? Well, we’re working from IRC ‘Channels’ against ‘Scientology’. Mix those words together and add the project in front, and you have it.

TorrentFreak: How did Anonymous start? and how many people take part in it?

Anonymous: Anonymous is an old group of friends. I don’t exactly know the date, but it has been raised by some friends who wanted to test out their hacking skills. Since then, they created Anonymous, and let it be open for anyone who wants to join. That made it into a new kind of hackers-group. It consists of two spheres. The outer sphere is for new people. They mostly are low-skilled and are “scriptkiddies”. Since they have a very good contact with the inner sphere (we’re all friends fast and easily), anyone is allowed to join the inner sphere of high-level hackers. This is a loose representation since it doesn’t fit always. But, this made it for sure into a group of scriptkiddies with the right tools and high-level hackers with the right skills.

TorrentFreak: What is your main motivation to ban Scientology from the Internet?

Anonymous: Scientology is a malicious organization. Here’s a YouTube clip that proves more. Also, they’re frequently taking off content from the Internet. Like a clip in which Cruise promotes Scientology too much, criticizing health science, etc… it would have brought Scientology in a bad situation. So they took it off all sites with an army of lawyers. This is censoring. This is bad. This is against Net Neutrality. This is taking away our freedom and our right to fight for that freedom.

TorrentFreak: Don’t you think your actions violate the freedom of speech?

Anonymous: It does violate the freedom of speech. Of course, we know that. But there should be a refinement. Anonymous fights for freedom of speech in a way they have always used, but a little bit rougher however. For a greater sake.

TorrentFreak: Do you see any parallels between your fight against Scientology and the conflicts between pirates and the entertainment industry?

Anonymous: Yes. Most of us are pirates too. We have no big money to start lawsuits. But the enemy, the MAFIAA and Scientology are both big companies. They misguide the law, they change the law. Scientology members have infiltrated in many governments. Just like the MAFIAA.

TorrentFreak: What is your ultimate goal for “Operation Chanology”?

Anonymous: Our ultimate goal is to let Scientology say in public that they are misleading many people. And that they are destroying the futures of many people.

TorrentFreak: How do you plan to accomplish this goal, apart from the DDoS attacks?

Anonymous: We have IRL raids in planning stage, we have real life protests and demonstrations coming up. We are infiltrating their networks with zip bombs. We are sentencing them.

TorrentFreak: You told us that you wanted the pirates to help you to free the Internet, how can people help?

Anonymous: People can help Anonymous by joining the IRC, get one of the DDoS tools and start firing the DoS. IRC is at irc.partyvan.org. Channels are #Target , #Lazer and #Xenu. There are also many local channels. They can also help us by joining protests, by telling other people about this, by telling their media, etc… The force of humanity will save many lives.

…

Update: As many already argued, it turns out that the person interviewed here is an Anonymous member from the “outer sphere”, who is not as informed as he appeared to be. Sorry.

“I know that I’m not as informed as the inner sphere. However, I had a source which I thought was from there, providing me many answers. He faked his status.
But we do not have one spokesperson. We do not have a leader.
We unite as one, divided by none.
Together, we will bring them down in their glory.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

If you’ve downloaded a torrent with the announce http://mongo56.org:3434/announce, simply open the torrent up with Maketorrent – second tab "View/Edit Torrent" and change the tracker announce to http://mongo56.org:3535/announce, click save – and the torrent will work anyways. This is also doable in clients that support editing of torrents. You can also use the command line; For linux; btreannounce.py http://mongo56.org:3535/announce /path/to/.torrent For windows: python btreannounce.py http://mongo56.org:3535/announce c:\path\to.torrent

Let’s hope things ge back to normal asap.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.