DoJ, FBI took down Megaupload.com earlier in the day
It has the makings of a nasty battle.
Anonymous didn’t take too kindly to the US Department of Justice taking down Megaupload.com today and apparently took down the Justice.gov site and many others.
The DoJ alleges that Megaupload.com has generated more than $175 million in criminal proceeds and cost copyright holders more than half a billion dollars.
In response to the DoJ action number of news outlets and the hacktivist group’s Twitter feed say it took down Justice.gov, the music industry’s Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America (RIAA.org) site and other sites with what appears to be a distributed denial of service attack.
The Twitter feed Anonymous@AnonDaily wrote:
- DOWN DOWN DOWN! https://www.copyright.gov/
- Anonymous/Megaupload backlash update: http://RIAA.ORG is now Tango Down | #OpPayback #OpMegaupload #SOPA #PIPA
- http://JUSTICE.GOV RIAA MPAA UNIVERAL MUSIC ALL DOWN! #OPMEGAUPLOAD
The battle stems from the FBI and DoJ taking part in what they called one of “the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States and directly targets the misuse of a public content storage and distribution site to commit and facilitate intellectual property crime,” the DOJ stated.
The DoJ also said that police today executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and eight countries, seized approximately $50 million in assets and targeted sites where Megaupload has servers in Ashburn, Va., Washington, D.C., the Netherlands and Canada. In addition, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., ordered the seizure of 18 domain names associated with the alleged Megaupload conspiracy.
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