Anonymous targets several U.S. websites
Posted January 20, 2012 7:09 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The hacktivist group Anonymous is fighting back against anti-piracy efforts in the United States, launching a series of attacks on the FBI, the Department of Justice, to name a few.
This widespread hacking — which Anonymous calls “the largest attack ever” — happened after authorities shut down the popular file-sharing site megaupload.com.
On its Twitter account, Anonymous stated: “You cannot censor the Internet. You cannot subpoena a hashtag. You cannot arrest an idea.”
“It’s basically the power of a massive group of people coming together. This wouldn’t be possible with one or two people. It’s one of those things which is very genuinely an expression of how many people are angry,” one of the group’s members told CNN.
He said they were able to take down 10 sites in total, including many in the entertainment industry.
They were able to do this with a distributed denial of service attack — that’s when so many computers flood a website with so much traffic that it causes it to shut down.
To shut down megaupload.com, federal authorities executed 20 search warrants in eight countries, including Canada, and seized $50-million worth of assets.
