Auslans

The day after the Internet blackout to protest the two pending anti-piracy bills, SOPA & PIPA the US Justice Department announced on  Thursday that it has conducted a major action to shut down MegaUpload because of online copyright infringement. The two sides of Megauploads (Megauploads and MegaVideos) are now unaccessible leaving a lot of streaming sites with large amounts of archived content missing.

More info from Rawstory.com

Hacktivists affiliated with the “Anonymous” movement took credit for crashing the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Universal Music Group on Thursday after the FBI shut down one of the most popular file sharing websites, MegaUpload.com.

“The DOJ web server hosting justice.gov is experiencing a significant increase in activity, resulting in a degradation in service,” the Justice Department tweeted hours after going offline. “The department is working to ensure the website is available while we investigate the origins of this activity which is being treated as a malicious act until we can fully identify the root cause of the disruption.”

The group later took credit for crashing the site of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. They also briefly knocked the sites of the U.S Copyright Office site, the record label BMI and the French copyright authority HADOPI offline. “Anonymous” hackers also gained internal access to the Utah Chiefs Of Police Association site.

The sites were apparently subjected to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), where the bandwidth or resources of a web server is flooded with Internet traffic in hopes of knocking it offline.