Tango down: Anonymous hacktivists delete CBS.com.
In a powerful and unique display of virtual prowess Anonymous hacktivists deleted the entire CBS website. The website went down late Sunday morning, and was off line for approximately 20 minutes.
In a fury over the government shut down of popular file-sharing website Megaupload, Anonymous has gone ballistic. In an extraordinary performance earlier this week, Anonymous hacktivists successfully disabled multiple government and entertainment websites in an action dubbed Operation Megaupload (#OpMegaupload). Sunday’s attack on CBS is a continuation of Operation Megaupload.
Anonymous hacktivists usually make use of a LOIC (Low Orbit Ion Canon) to conduct cyber attacks. A LOIC is used to execute DDoS attacks. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is an orchestrated attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.
However, the attack on CBS was different. PC Mag reports:
Anonymous seemed to have somehow acquired root access to CBS.com in this morning's attack, as members of the group were allegedly able to completely wipe the site's files and directories. Users attempting to access the main CBS index page were instead shown a directory structure containing just one file– foundry.html. Users attempting to access any of CBS.com's sub-sites, like bookmarked pages for its litany of television shows, for example, were met with 404 Not Found errors.
And Whats Hawt reports:
Rather than resorting to using DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks or XSS/SQL exploits, it looks like they’ve managed to gain access to the web root of the file servers and wipe them clean.
On Thursday, the notorious and nebulous international Internet hacktivist collective known as Anonymous staged their largest DDoS attack ever, disabling websites belonging to the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the Recording Industry of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Universal Music and BMI.com.
In addition to the unique attack on CBS, Anonymous also staged more conventional DDoS attacks on multiple targets.
Gizmodo reports UniversalMusic.com, the French entertainment conglomerate Vivendi, and websites belonging to Brazil's federal district and Tangara da Serra city, as well as other significant Brazilian websites, were all taken down via DDoS attack on Sunday.
Heroes or Villians?
What do you think about Operation Megaupload? Is Anonymous doing the right thing? Leave a comment, express yourself.
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