Thousands of Websites Affected by Anonymous DDoS Attack Against AFACT

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack launched by Anonymous against the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) yesterday, has ended up affecting almost 8,000 unrelated websites.

Operation Payback, the DDoS campaign led by Anonymous against anti-piracy groups and entertainment industry associations is now over a week old.

Since September 18th, when the coordinated attacks started, the group has hit websites belonging to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) and the Dutch Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland (BREIN).

Two UK-based law firms and an Indian company called Aiplex Software involved in anti-piracy efforts have also been attacked.

In fact, the actions of Aiplex, which openly admitted to DDoSing torrent sites on behalf of film studios, is what triggered this retaliation from Anonymous in the first place.

Yesterday, the group has turned its weapons against the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), who's website went offline under the flood of requests pretty fast.

However, the attack also affected AFACT's hoster, a company called Netregistry, which offers similar services to many Australian businesses and government agencies.

"A DDoS attack began to take place at approximately 8:30AM AEST, with a group of hackers attacking the firewall by flooding it with connections attempting to take down all servers.

"They had achieved success in disabling all access to some of the client facing services behind the firewall," an announcement posted on the company's website, reads.

The hosting provider summed up the damage by saying that "Websites running on the Zeus cluster (PHP clients not utilising Apache) experienced timeouts, webmail connections experienced timeouts and some other errors [and] access to TheConsole [control panel] was slow to none."

According to Panda Security, which monitored most attacks since Operation Payback started, afact.org.au suffered three separate service interruptions and a total downtime of 4 hours and 27 minutes.