Music industry sites DDoSed after Pirate Bay verdict

Hacktivism cuts both ways

Hacktivists have launched denial of service attacks against music industry association ifpi.org and lawyers involved in the prosecution of the four Pirate Bay defendants in the wake of a guilty verdict against the quartet last Friday.

The assault has rendered ifpi.org - the main website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - intermittently unavailable or sluggish for a time on Monday morning.

Discussions involving 250 hackers on irc.anonnet.org talk about retaliation on the ifpi and lawyers involved in the case and a desire to take the ifi.org website off the internet throughout Monday, at a minimum. Discussion on the attack can be found at irc channels at anonnet.org.

"They want to get the message across that the IFPI can not mess with the internet and that the internet is serious business," coldblood, an admin at anonnet.org told El Reg. "This is very much like the Scientology thing started more than a year ago now," he added.

Operation Baylout(NSFW), as the attack is called, also involved the reported defacement of the Swedish website of the IFPI.

Meanwhile limited distributed denial of service attacks against some Torrent tracker sites continued in the wake of guilty verdict against the four defendants in the high-profile Pirate Bay trial last Friday.

The main victim of attacks by as yet unidentified vigilantes (or possibly simple griefers) was free-torrents.org, reports security tools firm Arbor Networks. The assault against free-torrents.org has been going on for around a month, and so is hardly a new development. Arbor's findings (below) contradict rumours that large-scale denial of service attacks against multiple Torrent trackers were underway.

All in all, except for free-torrents.org getting attacked by a Black Energy botnet run out of China (using the C&C at hack-off.ru), we can’t corroborate this spate of attacks. Free-torrents.org has been getting pounded by this botnet since mid March, 2009, in fact. But none of the other major sites appear to be receiving such packet love.

Jose Nazario, manager of security research at Arbor Networks, notes that the trial involved the people who ran Pirate Bay, not the site itself, which remains operational. Even if The Pirate Bay was taken down something else would surely replace it. Nonetheless The Pirate Bay is a major interchange (most of the Pirate Bay swarms also include other trackers), so disrupting TPB may have an impact on BitTorrent traffic as a whole, at least for a short period.

The four Pirate Bay Defendants - Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström - were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison and heavy fines on Friday. The defendants intend to appeal. ®