What hath #OpMegaUpload wrought?

By CNET News staff
CNET

January 19, 2012

Web-site attacks ranged far and wide this afternoon, with online activists allegedly taking aim at more than a dozen Web sites [ http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-57362279-245/doj-fbi-entertainment-industry-sites-attacked-after-piracy-arrests/ ] of organizations with ties to controversial piracy legislation.

The attack, dubbed "Operation MegaUpload" comes on the heels of seven people being named in an indictment [ http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57362152-261/fbi-charges-megaupload-operators-with-piracy-crimes/ ], and four taken into custody on online piracy charges. One of those was Kim DotCom, aka Kim Schmitz, the founder of file hosting and sharing site MegaUpload.

The effort, which Anonymous claims to be "the largest scale attack ever," did not manage to bring down a handful of its targets during the first hour. That includes the White House, Sen. Chris Dodd, the FBI, and Viacom, all of which appeared to be up and running as usual. Others were not so lucky.

Below is a full list of targets that have been listed (in chronological order). We're also including updates if this list gets longer, and any notable up/downtimes:

Department of Justice (Justice.gov)
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA.org)
Universal Music (UniversalMusic.com)
Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (Anti-piracy.be/nl/)
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA.org)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI.gov)
HADOPI law site (HADOPI.fr)
U.S. Copyright Office (Copyright.gov)
Universal Music France (UniversalMusic.fr)
Senator Christopher Dodd (ChrisDodd.com)
Vivendi France (Vivendi.fr)
The White House (Whitehouse.gov)
BMI (BMI.com)
Warner Music Group (WMG.com)

Updates:

As of 4:04 p.m. PT: The White House, Copyright.gov, Chris Dodd, BMI, the MPAA, the FBI, Viacom, Universal Music's French site, the Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation and Vivendi's sites were all up and running. The others were all down.

As of 4:35 p.m. PT:The DOJ is back but is very, very slow to load, with some parts of the site not loading at all. Meanwhile, the FBI's site appears to be down, with the site throwing up an error page. Anonymous also officially added Warner Music Group to the list, noting in a tweet [ https://twitter.com/#!/AnonDaily/status/160158388322443264 ] that it's "overloaded with all the requests for DDoS checks."

The FBI's page:

The FBI's error screen from FBI.gov.
(Credit: CNET)

As of 4:50 p.m. PT:FBI's page back up now. The same cannot be said for Universal Music, which continues to be down alongside the DOJ site. Making a slight recovery is the RIAA's site, which continues to be slow loading, but now more closely resembles a Web site as opposed to a stream of links.

As of 5:01 p.m. PT: The DOJ site is back up and snappy. Warner Music Group's page is working, though slow to load. Anonymous marked that site as being overloaded less than an hour ago. Seemingly down is BMI's site, which an Anonymous tweet previously mis-typed as vehicle-maker BMW [ https://twitter.com/#!/AnonDaily/status/160154483979071488 ].

As of 5:23 p.m. PT: Universal Music's site and BMI remain down, with the FBI's site throwing up error messages again. The RIAA appears to be fully operational. No additional targets have been added to the list since Warner Music Group, which is currently up and running for us.

4:20 PM PST