Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Anonymous Hackers attack Indian government over file-sharing ban
Anonymous Hackers has
turned its attention to India, taking down the web sites of the Supreme
Court, the country’s two major political parties and several government
sites in retaliation for a court injunction which led to the blocking of
several video sharing and bit torrent sites.
Anonymous tweeted saying that it was now India’s time to bring in a new government.“Namaste
#India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a
new one. Good luck. | #SaveTPB #Anonymous #Censorship”.
The
hacking was reportedly in response to the blocking of torrent site
thepiratebay.com and vimeo.com.While the Supreme Court of India website
came back online after a little while, the Congress website was still
offline at the time of filing of this report.The Department of
Telecommunications (DoT) website had also reportedly come under attack.
The group first signalled its intent to launch #OpIndia in a YouTube message posted over a week ago, which said the following:
We
have come to the conclusion that the Indian government has failed. It
is time that we all rise and stand against the corrupt government. The
Department of Telecommunications has ordered Internet Service Providers
to block file-sharing sites in India. We cannot let this happen.
In late March,
Chennai-based Copyrightlabs won a restraining order that made Indian
ISPs and phone firms stop their customers reaching sites that were
illegally sharing copies of Bollywood films called 3 and Dhammu.
Some people can still access Vimeo and The Pirate Bay. It seems that the sites were initially blocked by Reliance, followed by Airtel. The users who faced the blocking got a message saying that this was due to a DOT regulation, but later the message said that it was because of a court order.
Some people can still access Vimeo and The Pirate Bay. It seems that the sites were initially blocked by Reliance, followed by Airtel. The users who faced the blocking got a message saying that this was due to a DOT regulation, but later the message said that it was because of a court order.
The
UN is expected to discuss the proposal in the next 72 hours. The
proposal would end "equal say" process for internet governance and push
the civil society to the fringes.The proposed Committee for Internet
Related Polices (CIRP) would be 50-member body funded by the UN. It
would meet once a year and would have the power to oversee all internet
standards bodies.
To knock out the sites,
Anonymous bombarded them with data, a tactic known as a Distributed
Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.The tactic had only partial success as
most of the sites targeted soon recovered and were only offline
intermittently.
Anonymous Tweet: "We are not doing any permanent damage to the websites. We just want file sharing sites to be unblocked."