India-based AiPlex Software said that when faced with uncooperative torrent sites they “flood the website with requests, which results in database error.” The admission, that the company engaged in what amounts to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, started off a momentous chain of events.

The confession irked the masses on the chat board 4Chan and many of its members, known as Anons (collectively ‘Anonymous’), plotted their revenge. Firing up their LOICs, they DDoS’d AiPlex in return, taking the site offline.

But despite letting off steam the rage did not subside and soon the MPAA and RIAA were being overwhelmed with traffic, along with the Bank of America, Visa and Mastercard who had cut off payments to Wikileaks. Operation Payback was underway and it would spread around the world.

In the three years that have since passed, authorities in various countries have rounded up some of those who coordinated and participated in the attacks. A few hours ago came the news that United States authorities have scheduled some payback of their own for more than a dozen Operation Payback participants.

A federal grand jury has indicted 13 alleged members of Anonymous on claims that they “did knowingly cause the transmission of a program, information, code, and command, and, as a result of such conduct, intentionally cause damage, and attempt to cause damage, without authorization, to a protected computer,” including those operated by the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the U.S. Copyright Office.

The indictment states that 13 men coordinated attacks by collectively deciding on targets and publishing their names and IP addresses along with proposed times and dates for the attacks. Via online postings and fliers, plus through the IRC channels #saveTPB, #savethepiratebay, and #operationpayback, the men allegedly recruited more individuals to the collective.

Interestingly, the indictment makes no specific mention of AiPlex’s illegal DDoS attacks on torrent sites, merely stating that Anonymous launched Operation Payback to retaliate “against the discontinuation of ‘The Pirate Bay’.”

In addition to United States-based targets including Warner Bros., the indictment lists attacks on the IFPI, BPI, ACS:Law, Davenport Lyons and Ministry of Sounds websites in the UK, against anti-piracy group BREIN in the Netherlands, one launched in Australia targeting the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), and another against French anti-piracy outfit Trident Media Guard.

Overall the indictment tries to paint a very bleak picture of the defendants engaging in a deliberate campaign of destruction during the course of Operation Payback. It often cites comments made by each individual as they allegedly went about arranging and motivating others to carry out attacks against high-profile targets.

“We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us,” is the Anonymous battle cry. United States authorities appear to operate with a similar philosophy.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

But his plan failed in the biggest way imaginable. HideMyAss (HMA) keep logs and as a UK company when given a court order to cough up information, they do so. After matching timestamps to IP addresses, in the blink of an eye Luzlsec member ‘Recursion’ became 23-year-old Cody Kretsinger from Phoenix. The FBI had their man.

While the outrage from the public has been well reported – many pro-privacy activists accused HideMyAss of becoming SellMyAss – what has not yet been documented is how elements of the VPN industry have reacted to the news.

VPN Council is probably best described as a trade organization for some, but not all, VPN providers. A document obtained by TorrentFreak which was penned by their Chief Information Officer and sent on September 25th, shows they are very concerned by recent events.

“There has been a lot of controversy, especially on Twitter that the actions taken by HMA were the wrong ones to take. I disagree with their consensus and I believe its time to implement tougher security reviews on new clients signing up for any VPN service,” the memo begins.

“Earlier this year several companies in our industry had discussed ideas about a shared fraud database between VPN providers. I believe in light of this incident that a renewed call for this would be a good idea and I’d like to re-open discussions on this because if we all sit back and do nothing and continue on with normal business like nothing happened, these same folks will go around popping off more VPN companies and causing more havoc than we’ve ever seen before,” the memo continues.

“I’m in favor of strengthening our respective industry and protecting it as well. We all share the same responsibility of protecting our legitimate clients and the industry as a whole and I’d be in favor of listening to you folks and seeing what additional ideas you guys have in this endeavor.”

In the days that followed, discussions between the VPN providers went ahead and reached consensus on the foundations of an “anti-fraud database” that would be shared among them.

In a second document titled ‘PROTECTING VPN INDUSTRY: FRAUD DB’ and dated September 28th, the problem of high profile hackers such as those from Lulzsec using VPN services is framed as a “direct threat to business survival.”

The document goes on to suggest a framework for the creation of a centralized fraud database which will enable VPN providers to “assess the quality of orders” for their services.

Items suggested for inclusion in the database (along with the supplied descriptions as provided in the memo) are listed as follows:

Fraud Data (hashed): This is a hashed piece of information that can be used to flag an order as fraud. This information could be: IPs, emails, user names (any other data susceptible of indicating fraud can be added).

Fraud Type: Identifier of the fraud type. We need to agree on fraud types list.

Hits: Number of hits (submissions from different VPN providers) this data has had. This will give more latitude to providers to decide to act on a given database result.

Submitter id: Identification of the VPN provider that has submitted the record.

An API will be created to interact with the database and integrate into payment processing systems.

Action points for the future are noted as decisions on database structure, hashing to be employed, parameters on what activities should be considered fraud and a decision on which VPN providers can access the database and who can update it. It is suggested that a single VPN provider should have responsibility for the entire list and others should have to pay their share of its maintenance costs.

What is clear from the above is that the included VPN providers will begin sharing information they hold on their customers with each other (albeit in hashed form), ostensibly to combat fraud. However, the alleged activities of the Lulzsec member in question aren’t easily described as fraud, and it is far from clear how a database of this nature would have prevented, for example, Sony being hacked.

TorrentFreak contacted the VPN Council and enquired on the depth of their definition of ‘fraud’ since confusingly hacking seems to come under that banner and indeed sparked the apparent need for this database. For instance, would copyright infringement come under that heading too?

“Copyright infringement is not factored into our plans,” VPN Council CIO Jared Twler told us. “This is more about financial payment fraud and network abusers/hackers. This is more to the tune of preventing federal disasters happening on VPN provider networks.”

But of course, when copyright infringement is considered serious enough by the US government it can become a big criminal issue, recent ICE and FBI activity against sites and certain file-sharers and release groups show that.

Clearly the activities of malicious hackers cannot be condoned by the VPN providers and combating fraud is a requirement in many online businesses. But what we see here and in the Lulzsec/HideMyAss fiasco is a clash of ideals that could prove catastrophic.

Most VPN providers sell their services on the notion that by using them the subscriber becomes anonymous. It became crystal clear in September that, given the right pressure, what certain VPN providers are really interested in is upholding the law and thereby saving their own asses from ending up in court. Why this should come as a surprise to anyone is a mystery.

What does come as a surprise is how many VPN providers are allowing themselves to get into this conflict of interests in the first instance. In the HideMyAss case the company clearly held enough information for a 3rd party to match a HMA external IP address and a timestamp to a HMA user account and subsequently a real-life identity.

So, for the purposes of illustration, let’s dismiss the notion that the service was used to attack Sony. Let’s pretend it was a dissident, or a government whistleblower, or some other equally vulnerable individual relying on the service to provide anonymity, as advertised. Let’s be absolutely clear – thanks to the myriad of logs kept by HMA, when someone really needs to count on the service, there is no anonymity that a court order can’t destroy.

Many VPN companies argue that they don’t log the sites visited but some logs are necessary to make sure that ‘criminals’ can’t abuse their services. But logs don’t discriminate. Quite simply, criminal or not, if a VPN provider logs the external IP addresses they hand out to a user along with a timestamp, subscribers are not anonymous.

But while all VPN providers have a duty to uphold the law and be accountable to the government in the country where they are based, not all of them are required by law to carry logs – so they don’t. But who are they?

If you’re a VPN provider and take privacy seriously, contact us immediately to be included in tomorrow’s VPN anonymity report. We’ll ask you two very simple but crucial questions.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

At least, that was the plan.

It now appears that the recent accomplishments of LulzSec and Anonymous have changed the minds of Telstra’s top executives.

With the threat of becoming the prime target of these Internet vigilantes in the back of their minds, the Government blocklist is no longer that appealing.

The Australian reports:

“It is understood Telstra was last night still grappling with the decision as to whether to commit to the voluntary filter because of fears of reprisals from the internet vigilantes behind a spate of recent cyber attacks.”

“It is understood the unstructured collective of hackers that identifies itself as Lulz Security, which has an agenda to wreak havoc on corporate and government cyber assets, claiming this is to expose security flaws, is one of Telstra main concerns.”

“The other main concern is a group that identifies itself as Anonymous, another unstructured hacker collective that claims to be opposed to any form of internet censorship, and has carried out attacks on Australian government websites because of Canberra’s support for an internet filter on child pornography.”

Aside from LulzSec and Anonymous many other parties including the Aussie Pirate Party have criticized the Internet filter.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

In a memo dated May 30th, SKMM – the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission – listed several sites to be censored including Pirate Bay, MegaUpload, DepostFiles and PutLocker. The government of Malaysia had previously warned that the sites infringe copyright law.

Now, as they have done so many times in recent months, Anonymous have entered the controversy with the following statement announcing Operation Malaysia:

We have seen the censorship taken by the Malaysian government, blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, and WikiLeaks. Malaysia is one of the world’s strictest governments, even blocking out movies, and television shows. These acts of censorship are inexcusable. You are taking away a basic human right.

We fear that if you make further decisions to take away human freedom. We are obligated to act fast and have no mercy. For rules were meant to be broken. And corruption was meant to be washed away and forgiven. Now we will wash your corruption away so be prepared. Take this as a favor.

Operation Malaysia appears to have only one target – the Malaysia.gov.my website

These are turbulent times for the loose-knit group. Following the arrests of 3 individuals in Spain last week, Turkey has just arrested 32 alleged Anonymous members following attacks on government services there.

Yesterday Anonymous warned it was about to launch Operation Empire State Rebellion against the US Federal Reserve, a particularly sensitive and perhaps dangerous target even by Anonymous’ standards.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The raids, which involved 250 police and other authorities tackling 42 locations in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands, followed an intensive investigation carried out by the Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group GVU.

The main suspect is said to have been detained in Leipzig and another arrestee in Spain. One individual is still at large (possibly the admin of cyberlocker service, unconfirmed) and another has since been released. As of Thursday evening, reports suggested the rest remained in custody.

As we are aware, Kino.to hosted no illegal content, but indexed material and provided links to movies and TV shows stored on file-hosters and other streaming services.

Crucially, those links have to be put there by someone and that task fell to Kino.to’s loose-knit team of link uploaders. In the wake of the site’s demise, one of them has just broken ranks and given an interesting interview on how parts of the site operated.

Speaking under the assumed name John Sandy, the uploader said that he regularly supplied Kino.to with links to documentaries and US TV shows, the most-viewed content on the site.

The links offered by Sandy were submitted to a hidden area of the site and were subsequently moderated, probably for duplicates and quality. Whether this process was carried out by man or machine, Sandy isn’t sure. Successful links went on to make it to the site’s public facing webpage for regular users to access.

Sandy says that he had no contact with the site’s operators and there was no direct financial reward for uploading TV show links to Kino.to. However, Sandy said that there is money in uploading content to file-hosters and he had made around $1,000 per month by generating traffic to these sites.

“I don’t see myself as a criminal,” Sandy explained. “If America can watch these series episodes for free and legally, why should this be not allowed in Germany?”

While GVU and Hollywood won’t be pleased that US TV shows were available via links on Kino.to, it’s fair to say that the addition of hundreds, maybe thousands of movies proved even less popular. The sheer size of the site and its prominence meant that it was just a matter of time before it became a target.

However, while all of the publicity has been focused on the takedown of Kino.to, either by design or huge coincidence at least four German-hosted storage sites – Duckload.com, Frog Movz, Karamba Vidz and Loombo – all suddenly disappeared after the raid.

TorrentFreak is informed that the admin of Duckload was one of the individuals sought by the police and that their operation – which is believed to be around 500 servers – was completely shutdown. Initially the feeling was that Duckload would come back online but the seriousness of the situation appears to be hitting home and now a return seems unlikely, at least at this stage.

Several other hosters in a range of locations are also down. They include archiv.to, quickload.to, tubeload.to and loaded.it. Whether not they were connected to Kino.to, or the indeed the raids, remains to be seen. Another cyberlocker – Freeload.to – was definitely connected since it’s now displaying the same shutdown notice as Kino.to.

But these sites aren’t the only ones connected to the operation which had their services disrupted this week. The website of GVU, the anti-piracy brains behind the Kino.to takedown, was also taken offline following a DDoS attack carried out by Anonymous.

German members of the group put up a video on YouTube describing the attack and according to a translation by Janko Roettgers, they declared the following:

“We believe that running a search engine for videos isn’t illegal… That’s why we immediately reacted by taking down the GVU website… Knowledge is free, and streaming is, too.”

The DDoS attack itself had limited effect and the GVU site is now fully operational, which is more than can be said for Kino.to and several file-hosting services. Nevertheless, rumors of a Kino.to resurrection from an old site backup are circulating. Stranger things have happened but that would be a particularly brave move, especially in Europe.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Or, to put it another way, someone flooded it with huge amounts of traffic rendering it completely useless.

Earlier today, parliamentary service manager Geoff Thorn sent an email to MPs explaining that the site (which should be available here) was struggling under excessive load.

“It is possible that this traffic is related to a public threat to bring down the Parliamentary website,” Thorn said.

That public threat was made by Anonymous, who said they would take action following New Zealand’s introduction of controversial legislation to deal with illicit file-sharing.

Thus far, Anonymous have not claimed responsibility. Others are choosing to have their voices heard in other ways.

Read More

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Since the beginning of the year the group has been releasing videos to spread news and details of forthcoming operations. Many, if not all, Anonymous videos have been uploaded to YouTube but since the start of April the Google-owned site has been censoring them.

The last three – Operation Sony – April 4, 2011, Operation Sony Update – April 12, 2011 and Operation Black Out – April 18, 2011 – have all been removed on Terms of Service violations.

The one we were most interested in was the latter, which contained information on a planned protest against the New Zealand government. They passed a 3 strikes-style law to deal with online file-sharing last week which hasn’t impressed Anonymous.

According to information received by TorrentFreak, Anonymous still have some heavy punishment for Sony up their collective sleeves. The anonymous (that’s a small ‘a’) tip suggests that a DDoS is coming, but one with a new technical twist, not previously utilized by the group.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The operation started initially as ‘payback’ against outfits that tried to stop the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, and DDoS attacks were organized to strike back. A few days ago, the operation changed course and instead began to go after organizations that displayed opposition towards Wikileaks.

Over the last days several high profile companies and institutions were taken offline temporarily by DDoS attacks including Mastercard, Visa and Paypal. Conversely, Operation Payback’s operation was also obstructed with the deletion of their Twitter and Facebook accounts after the news hit the mainstream media.

Yesterday, this was followed by the arrest (Dutch) of an alleged ‘member’ of Operation Payback in The Netherlands. The local police announced that a 16 year old boy was arrested, suspected of being involved in the DDoS attacks on Wikileaks related targets.

The boy, whose identity was not released, will be heard in court today and has reportedly confessed to his involvement.

According to several sources the arrestee is known online under the nickname Jeroenz0r. The authorities have not yet confirmed this, but the person using this nickname has been ‘missing’ online for the past 24 hours, and has been involved with Operation Payback for quite a while. Jeroenz0r was also an IRC operator at thefailship.net, where one of the former IRC channels of Operation Payback was hosted.

“Jeroenz0r and his server became delinked Thursday night at around midnight UTC time,” a source told TorrentFreak, confirming that the teenager lives in The Hague, where the arrest was made.

“Some of his friends tried calling him yesterday but the phone lead to voicemail. When calling his home number, his dad refused to comment on the situation. Furthermore, his local town newspaper also reported that a local 16 year old boy was arrested.”

Another source, who acts as an Operation Payback spokesman, confirmed that Jeroenz0r has been unreachable since the time of the arrest.

How the police became aware of Jeroenz0r is unknown, but we were told that he didn’t cover his tracks too well.

“Others on the network who know him a bit better knew that he was sloppy and often left traces from his actions online. Also, the Google results on him are quite impressive and indicate that he has been quite active in the torrent scene.”

In a possible response to the arrest, the Dutch Prosecution Office now seems to be under a DDoS attack. Previously the Dutch police stated that they will not go after people who ‘make their computers available” for these attacks, but that they will target people who are more heavily involved.

Update: The Failship IRC team released the following message.

Dear OM [Dutch Prosecution Office],

The remarkably swift arrest of Jeroenz0r, a 16 year old Dutch student, has been all over the international media since the event took place. While the Kremlin takes a dig at the U.S. over Assange’s arrest, while Facebook and Twitter delete the accounts of cyber activists, while over 9,000 ‘hacktivists’ are believed to be behind electronic onslaught, the Dutch authorities arrest a 16-year-old boy
suspected of involvement with Operation Payback.

The whole world reports about WikiLeaks and Operation Payback. How could an underage boy be held responsible for making the world wide news? How could the Dutch authorities hold a 16 year old boy responsible for the world being in a state of digital war?

Is it in the haste of getting something done, that the Dutch government labeled him as a scapegoat and a terrorist, just so they could say: “We have done our part about the cyber terrorists”? Is the detention and possible conviction of Jeroenz0r an act by law,
or is it –as we suspect– a political statement? Is Jeroenz0r being used to scare the
hell out of everybody who would think that they could do something about censorship and the forces our governments (ab)use?

If this would be a fair trial, what evidence would there be? He may have been a user, or even host for an IRC server, still, this may hopefully not be the primary reason? Even if he had an active role in coordinating the attacks on MasterCard and Visa, which is still improbable, Anonymous is not a personal army and will not be commanded like one. How then, would that incriminate him if everybody is responsible for his/her own deeds? One student would never be powerful enough to take down corporations like MasterCard, Visa or Paypal.

Could we accept that in todays’ society, big corporations are using children as a means of manipulating people for their own gain and benefit? What could have happened if the government had decided to stick out for freedom of expression and free speech, and refused to bend under the demands of MasterCard and Visa? It could have turned out to be a turning point in the war between big corporations and the people who get caught in the gears of the system and have no means of making their way out from the mess.

Eventually, even the government will have to decide, either to be the puppet in the hands of global corporations, or be the one who paved way for rebellion against oppressive corporations and corruption of our society.

We would like Jeroenz0r to know that Anonymous will not be giving up on him. One for all, all for one. Divided by zero.

Signed:
10.12.2010
Failship IRC team
Anonboots, Bnon, (Jeroenz0r), Kris, Paws, Zeekill

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Initially DDoS assaults were started against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software because these outfits had targeted The Pirate Bay. Those DDoS attacks were later replicated against many other targets that have spoken out against piracy or for copyright, resulting in widespread media coverage.

Even law enforcement agencies showed interest in the operation recently. Last week CNET reported that an FBI probe is underway, and TorrentFreak personally knows of at least one court case against a person that was associated with the operation.

Besides covering the results of the DDoS attacks and website hacks, very little is known about the people who are part of the operation. Who are they? What do they want, and what are their future plans? In this article we hope to solve a few pieces of the puzzle.

After numerous talks with people who are actively involved in Operation Payback, we learned that there are huge differences between the personal beliefs of members.

We can safely conclude that this Anonymous group doesn’t have a broad shared set of ideals. Instead, it is bound together by anger, frustration and the desire to be heard. Their actions are a direct response to the anti-piracy efforts of pro-copyright groups.

Aside from shared frustration, the people affiliated with the operation have something else in common. They are nearly all self-described geeks, avid file-sharers and many also have programming skills.

When Operation Payback started most players were not looking to participate in the copyright debate in a constructive way, they simply wanted to pay back the outfits that dared to target something they loved: file-sharing.

Many of the first participants who set the DDoS actions in motion either came from or were recruited on the message board 4Chan. But as the operation developed the 4Chan connection slowly disappeared. What’s left today are around a dozen members who are actively involved in planning the operation’s future, and several dozen more who help to execute the DDoS attacks.

An Anonymous spokesperson, from whose hand most of the manifestos originated, described the structure of the different groups to us.

“The core group is the #command channel on IRC. This core group does nothing more than being some sort of intermediary between the people in that IRC channel and the actual attack. Another group of people on IRC (the main channel called #operationpayback) are just there to fire on targets.”

Occasionally new people are invited to join the command to coordinate a specific attack, but a small group of people remains. The command group is also the place where new targets are picked, where future plans are discussed, and where manifestos are drafted. This self-appointed group makes most of the decisions, but often acts upon suggestions from bypassers in the main IRC channel.

Now let’s rewind a little and go back to the first attacks that started off the operation in September.

The operation’s command was ‘pleasantly’ surprised by the overwhelming media coverage and attention, but wondered where to go from there. They became the center of attention but really had no plan going forward. Eventually they decided to continue down the road that brought them there in the first place – more DDoS attacks.

What started as a retaliation against groups that wanted to take out The Pirate Bay slowly transformed into an attack against anyone involved in anti-piracy efforts. From trade groups, to lawyers, to dissenting artists. Since not all members were actively following the copyright debate, command often acted on suggestions from the public in the main IRC channel.

What followed was an avalanche of DDoS attacks that were picked up by several media outlets. This motivated the group to continue their strategy. Anonymous’ spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that the media attention was indeed part of what fuelled the operation to go forward. But not without some strategic mistakes.

As the operation continued more trivial targets were introduced and the group started to lose sympathy from parts of the public. While targeting the company that admittedly DDoSed The Pirate Bay could be seen as payback by some, trying to take out Government bodies such as the United States Copyright Office and UK’s Intellectual Property Office made less sense. In part, these targets were chosen by anarchistic influences in the operation.

“I fight with anonops because I believe that the current political system failed, and that a system based on anarchy is the only viable system,” one member told TorrentFreak. “I encouraged them to go after political targets just because I like Anarchy.”

The Anonymous spokesperson admitted to TorrentFreak that mistakes were made, and command also realized that something had to change. The targets were running out and the attacks weren’t gaining as much attention as they did in the beginning. It was a great way to gather attention, but not sustainable. In fact, even from within the operation not everyone was convinced that DDoS attacks were the best ‘solution’.

“I personally don’t like the concept of violence and attacking, but violence itself does raise attention,” Anonymous’ spokesperson told TorrentFreak.

“Attacking sites is one side of the story, but this operation would finally have to serve a purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. We all agree that the way things [abuse of copyright] are currently done, is not the right way.”

Last week command decided to slow the DDoS attacks down and choose another strategy, mainly to regain the focus of attention. It was decided that they would make a list of demands for governments worldwide. In a move opposed to the desires of the anarchic influences, command decided to get involved in the political discussion.

Copyright/patent laws have to change, they argued, and from the bat they were willing to negotiate. They called for scrapping censorship, anti-piracy lawsuits and limiting copyright and patent terms, but not getting rid of copyright entirely. Interestingly, there is also no word in the demands about legalizing file-sharing.

To some this new and more gentle position taken by Anonymous came as a complete surprise. We asked the spokesman of the group about this confusing message and he said that there are actually several political parties that already adopt a similar position, like the Pirate parties and the Greens in Europe.

However, according to the spokesman (who wrote the latest manifesto with other members in Piratepad) they consciously chose this set of demands. “Some of us have the vision of actually getting rid of copyright/patents entirely, but we are at least trying to stay slightly realistic.”

“What we are now trying to do, is to straighten out ideals, and trying to make them both heard and accepted. Nobody would listen to us if we said piracy should be legal, but when we ask for copyright lifespan to be reduced to ‘fair’ lengths, that would sound a lot more reasonable,” the spokesman told TorrentFreak.

The demands have been published on the Operation Payback site for nearly a week, but thus far the media coverage hasn’t been as great as when they launched their first DDoS. Some have wondered whether this is the right path to continue in the first place, as it may get in the way of groups and political parties that have fought for similar ‘ideals’ for years already.

The spokesman disagreed and said that Operation Payback has “momentum” now.

So here we are nearly two months after Anonymous started Operation Payback. The initial anger and frustration seems to have been replaced by a more friendly form of activism for the time being. The group wanted to have their voice heard and they succeeded in that. However, being listened to by politicians and entertainment industry bosses might take more than that.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The operation began during the third week of September with DDoS assaults against the MPAA, RIAA and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software. The latter was chosen as the first target because the outfit openly admitted to DDoSing several torrent sites including The Pirate Bay.

Those DDoS attacks were later replicated against lawfirms engaging in ‘pay-up-or-else’ schemes, which indirectly led to the email leak at ACS:Law. After that followed many more targets, most of which we didn’t cover here. Earlier this week, the MPAA was shamed again by Anonymous when their DRM website got hacked.

Yesterday, another high profile attack was launched, aimed to take down a website belonging to a government body this time. The people involved in Operation Payback had selected the UK’s Intellectual Property Office as their victim and announced that the DDoS would start at 5PM GMT. And so it happened.

At the time of writing, 18 hours into the DDoS, ipo.gov.uk is still unresponsive.

The Intellectual Property Office is “Perpetuating the system that is allowing the exploitative usage of copyright and intellectual property” according to the Anonymous DDoSers, who opened up a new can of targets with this attack.

As a Government body the UK Intellectual Property Office has been heavily involved in copyright issues and prospective laws. Earlier this year the Office spoke out against criminalizing illicit file-sharing as proposed in the ACTA treaty.

Instead of creating new laws to combat online piracy, it said the focus should be on providing “a framework to better enforce existing laws.”

Targeting government offices is certainly a step up for Anonymous. Time will tell what they dream up next but this one will probably turn a few heads.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.