Following a major Thursday evening cyber-assault by hacktivist collective Anonymous, the Justice Department’s website was taken offline. The site crashed yet again Friday afternoon.
The Justice Department was targeted in retaliation for its takedown of the popular file-sharing franchise MegaUpload, which was registered in Hong Kong.
The DOJ action, and the hacker group’s reaction, came one day after the Internet-wide SOPA “Blackout Day.”
SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, and its sister bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, faced criticism from lawmakers and organizations on all sides of the political spectrum who believed that the bills were too broad and threatened free speech.
Anonymous modified its signature tactic — the DDOS, or distributive denial of service — to take down sites for the entertainment industry, the Justice Department and the FBI. Group members usually participate in an attack voluntarily, overloading a target website’s servers with high volumes of traffic. But last night’s attack was different.
The group weaponized Twitter by distributing a link that would ensnare a user’s computer into the attack by involuntarily uploading software on the computer that would then redirect it to the target site and repeatedly call the site’s servers. When enough computers focused in on a site, the servers would crash.
The link, according to Gawker, spread at a rate of four times a minute, or every 15 seconds. DDOS attacks are considered illegal.
Anonymous, a leaderless group, in December declared war on members of Congress and industry associations supporting the bills. The group is no stranger to targeting governments, regimes and corporations it believes to be oppressive.
The DOJ was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. It is unknown whether Friday’s outage was caused by a follow-up attack or an additional server failure. As of 4 p.m. EST, Justice.gov was restored.