Several music industry websites have been targeted by ‘cyber attacks’ as part of a revenge campaign by fans of Swedish website Pirate Bay.
The debate over illegal downloading rages on. To some, it is a harmless pursuit which allows fans to ‘try before they buy’. However for others in the music industry it is a cancer which is crippling new music.
The case of Swedish website The Pirate Bay put the argument in context. On one side were a crack team of lawyers, funded by a variety of entertainment companies and music industry bodies.
On the other were a team of programmers. A high profile case, the Pirate Bay group were found guilty – a decision which appears to have sparked ‘cyber attacks’ in retaliation.
Notorious American website 4chan is at the centre of the allegations. According to reports, a co-ordinated assault temporarily knocked the websites of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) offline.
The campaign is being called “Operation Payback” and was apparently prompted by a revelation from Indian company Aiplex. The firm told the Sydney Morning Herald that it used cyber attacks against sites hosting illegal downloads of movies.
The firm revealed that it used Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, where a website receives multiple requests for pages.
The activists blamed this revelation for their actions. “We brought them down the same way they brought down The Pirate Bay, with a distributed denial of service,” the group said in message posted on the web.
“They hired aiplex.com, who has been taken care of as well. They struck first, we struck harder.”
Speaking to BBC News, Aiplex confirmed that they had suffered an attack. “Our site was under attack for some time,” he said, revealing that the site remained offline for “about a day and a half”.
