Operation Payback
The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals.
In 2010, several Bollywood companies hired Aiplex Software to launch DDoS attacks on websites that did not respond to takedown notices.
I have far more concern over the fact of my train turning up 10 minutes late or having to queue for a coffee than them wasting my time with this sort of rubbish.
[13][14][15] Some of the emails contained unencrypted Excel spreadsheets, listing the names and addresses of people that ACS:Law had accused of illegally sharing media.
[18] This alleged breach of the Data Protection Act has become part of the ongoing investigation into ACS:Law by the Information Commissioner's Office.
[4] On September 27, 2010, the DDoS attack on the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) unintentionally brought down 8,000 other small websites hosted on the same server.
[25] In September 2010, in an attempt to ensure that Portuguese citizens could not access thepiratebay.org, Associação do Comércio Audiovisual de Portugal (ACAPOR) filed a complaint against The Pirate Bay.
According to the movie rental association, The Pirate Bay is directly responsible for about 15 million illegal downloads in Portugal every year.
[26] On October 18, 2010, the ACAPOR website was defaced, presenting text from Operation Payback and a redirect to The Pirate Bay after a few seconds.
[27][28] The leaked e-mails so far revealed ACAPOR's methods of denunciation, its dissatisfaction with the Portuguese government and justice system,[29] its perception of the copyright debate as war, and its antagonism with the ISPs.
[7] On October 15, 2010, Copyprotected.com was SQL injected and defaced,[7][33] and three days later Operation Payback launched a DDoS attack against the UK Intellectual Property Office.
[37]In response to Simmons' comments,[38] members of Operation Payback switched their attentions to his two websites, SimmonsRecords.com and GeneSimmons.com, taking them both offline for a total of 38 hours.
[49][50] In retaliation,[51] members of Operation Payback announced that they would attack RIAA's website on October 29, despite the fact that the group typically does not hit the same target twice.
The date for the protest activities were on November 5, the intended day of the Gunpowder Plot, with which Anonymous heavily affiliates through its use of Guy Fawkes masks.
[65] The hiatus lasted about four months, ending with an early March 2011 attack that temporarily took down the website of BMI, a prominent collection society operating on behalf of music publishers.
Corporations such as Amazon, PayPal, BankAmerica, Swiss bank PostFinance, MasterCard and Visa either stopped working with or froze their customers' donations to WikiLeaks due to political pressures.
[85] On December 10, 2010, The Daily Telegraph reported that Anonymous had threatened to disrupt British government websites if Assange were extradited to Sweden.
[88] Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow described the attacks as "the shot heard round the world—this is Lexington.
[90] The following is a list of sites and domains known to have been targeted: Operation Payback's attempt to take down Amazon.com was aborted after they failed to recruit enough users to their botnet; CNN noted that the massive Amazon website "is almost impossible to crash.
[102] On January 27, 2011, five males aged between 15 and 26 were arrested in early morning raids in the U.K. on suspicion of involvement,[103] and the FBI executed 40 search warrants the same day.
"[63] There was also some criticism from the Pirate Party UK and United States Pirate Party, which in a joint public statement urged the group to "Immediately cease the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks and to instead seek out a legal method to express your frustration and disquiet with the copyright industry, and their perversions of copyright law for personal gain.
[107] Operation Payback members used a modified version of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) to execute the DDoS attacks.
Utilising this tool, the coordinators of Operation Payback were able to quickly take down websites belonging to anti-piracy groups.
[116] In October 2013, 13 members of Operation Payback were indicted in Federal court in Alexandria, Virginia as co-conspirators in violation of 18 U.S.C.
