Practical Technology

for practical people.

Weekend Anonymous attacks bring down major websites

| 0 comments

The Internet-based hacker and protest group Anonymous is still ticked up by the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) takedown of Megaupload. Last week, Anonymous took down the DoJ, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Over the weekend, Anonymous brought down CBS, Universal Music, and Vivendi. Will Facebook be next?

While Universal Music and Vivendi, the French media giant that owns Universal, were brought down by a DDoS attack, CBS, ZDNet’s parent company, was hit by a Domain Name System (DNS) poisoning attack.

In the CBS attack, it appeared that the site itself had been hacked and all its content deleted. That wasn’t the case. The CBS site was fine. What actually happened was that DNS record for the site’s IP address was changed to a fake site that contained a single blank page. IF you’d attempted to reach any of CBS’s sub-sites, for a TV show’s page for example, you would have gotten only a generic 404 Not Found error message page.

Weekend Anonymous attacks bring down major websites More >

Leave a Reply