PIRATES COUNTER-ATTACK, BRING DOWN MPAA, RIAA SITES

An apparently coordinated attack by users of BitTorrent sites, led by 4chan.com, brought down the Motion Picture Association of America’s website on Friday and Saturday in what the cyber protesters called “Operation Payback.” The website TorrentFreak reported that the protesters moved on to the website of the Recording Industry Association of America on Sunday and that more strikes on the British Phonographic Industry site were scheduled for today. Additional attacks have targeted Bangalore-based Aiplex.com, which has used so-called distributed denial of service attacks to bring down BitTorrent sites in the past. In a notice posted on several BitTorrent sites, the protesters said today (Monday): “For the past 72 hours we have brought down the oppressive [sic] RIAA and MPAA. These corperations [sic] have fought to restrict our freedoms. They chose the tatic[sic]: DDoS. It is only fair that we return in kind.”