Sep 22, 2010 09:09 GMT  ·  By

The sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks conducted by 4chan members against anti-piracy organizations continue with UK-based ACS:Law Solicitors becoming the new target.

The DDoS campaign is called “Operation Payback” and was started by members of the 4chan image board in retaliation to the actions of an Indian company paid by film studios to harass torrent sites.

The first attack was launched on Saturday against mpaa.org, the website of the Motion Picture Association of America, but after almost 24 hours of downtime, the target was switched to riaa.com (the Recording Industry Association of America).

IFPI.org (the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) was also hit and taken offline at about the same time, but this might have been caused by individuals acting on their own.

A similar attack was scheduled against bpi.co.uk (the British Phonographic Industry), but failed after the IRC channel used by the attackers to coordinate was hacked.

The latest target is ACS:Law Solicitors, a British law firm notorious for sending legal threats to Internet users suspected of copyright.

The company asks the alleged offenders to pay certain sums of money in order to avoid being taken to court, a method, which some people have argued is similar to blackmail.

"Whilst many companies offer anti-piracy measures, these are often costly and ineffective. Our approach is quite the opposite, it generates revenue for rights holders and effectively decreases copyright infringement in a measurable and sustainable way," ACS:Law boasts on its website.

TorrentFreak reports that the decision to attack the British company was taken by the admins of the IRC channel after a vote. "After announcing that this was our new target, the website went down instantly," one of them said.

At the time of writing this article, the www.acs-law.org.uk website is suspended by its hosting provider, probably because it exceeded it's monthly traffic quota.

Meanwhile, the site of Aiplex Software, the Indian company, which acknowledged DDoSing torrent trackers, has remained a primary target this whole time.

According to Panda Security, as of yesterday, aiplex.com registered 198 service interruptions and 25 hours 17 minutes of total downtime.

The security vendor, which has monitored the attacks, also notes that anti-piracy.nl (BREIN) has also been selected as a future target.