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Reacting to news of a US Justice Department indictment against streaming upload site magaupload along with the website’s seizure, the hactivist group Anonymous has taken down none other than the US Justice Department website.
They are calling it the largest attack ever. The attack occurred Thursday evening (January 19, 2012) with the Justice.gov site still down as of press time 8 pm EST. At about 7:40 p.m. ET, the FBI's site went down, but was back up about 2 minutes later. It went down again about 7:53 p.m. ET. The DOJ site went down about 5:30 p.m. ET, and remains inaccessible.
The indictment against magaupload comes just one day after a massive Internet protest against The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that resulted in a number of Congresspersons and Senators backing off co-sponsorship of the controversial bill.
Websites like Wikipedia completely blacked out while search engine giant Google blacked out its name graphic. Gambling911.com also showed its opposition to the proposed bill by blacking out its name graphic. The online gambling sector has been hit by more than a dozen domain seizures over the past year.
In all, Anonymous, via their Twitter feed, says they've taken down a handful of government and music industry websites, including Copyright.gov, RIAA.org, which is the website for Recording Industry Association of America, Universal Music Group, BMI.com, Warner Music Group, and mpaa.org, the website of Motion Picture Association of America.
- Chris Costigan, Gamlbing911.com Publisher
