Anonymous is back, and this time they have launched a pair of operations. The first is in response to the takedown of the Megaupload.com site by the FBI and other authorities. The second operation is to continue to support the protest for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). However, their operation is targeting the members of Congress that support it. So far, the sites of the Justice Department, Universal Music Group, and several congressional sites have been affected.
The attacks began as Anonymous’ Sabu called for people to boycott paid media in all forms and to promote torrent and file sharing sites. “This new, massive operation, will target on SOPA/PIPA in a way that the government was not expecting,” he posted on Twitter. “We are going to starve the beast.” In response to the arrest of Megaupload.com’s founders, he said, “This is the governments way of saying: ‘How nice of you to protest SOPA/PIPA. But we still are in control.’ Fuck this.”
The Department of Justice and Universal Music sites were both made unavailable by denial of service attacks. Anonymous’ Barrett Brown told RT.com that “It was in retaliation for Megaupload, as was the concurrent attack on Justice.org.” Both sites remained down for quite some time and attacks were being mounted for a few days. Anonymous members have also targeted the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America and the White House, as well as other government sites.
In a wave of attacks labelled “OpDonkeyPunch” by Barrett Brown, the frequent spokesperson for Anonymous, the group is targeting Democrats in Congress who support SOPA. OpDonkeyPunch is directly targeting those people’s websites. Brown also published the fax machine phone number for Republic Rep. Lamar Smith, sponsor of SOPA.
In an e-mail, Brown stated that the intention of OpDonkeyPunch “is to show Democrats that they can’t just slide through on this and escape notice, that we can do more damage to their fundraising ability than they realize.” The efforts of Anonymous have extended and expanded to Facebook and Twitter accounts of SOPA supporters. However, they are not hacking these accounts, as they don’t want these sites shut down at all. No, Anonymous is spamming messages to the supporters messages, walls, and feeds.
Source: Ars Technica