Operation Payback: Anonymous group causes service interruptions

The DDoS attacks organized by the Anonymous cyber-activist group against SGAE (Spanish copyright collection society), the Spanish Culture Ministry and Promusicae, which began last Wednesday, have caused 119 service interruptions and more than 68 hours of downtime across the three websites.

The sgae.es site has been inaccessible for the longest: more than 41 hours since the start of the attack.

Operation Payback (the name given to the series of protests against copyright protection agencies and companies) has so far caused 742 service interruptions to the 11 websites of the target organizations since it began 20 days ago. These interruptions have caused a total of over 550 hours downtime.

According to Luis Corrons, Technical Director of PandaLabs: “The popularization of this group’s activities has led many users without much technical know-how to join in. In fact, there are numerous tutorials and tools available for launching DdoS attacks across the Web. This also means that not everyone is taking the steps necessary to cover their tracks, such as hiding IPs. If there is an investigation, it would be possible to follow the trail and locate some of the protesters.”

Operation Payback began twenty days ago. The self-proclaimed “anarchist” group, activists for the defense of free P2P file-sharing and against copyright protection agencies, do not consider themselves to be cyber-criminals and claim not to be financially motivated: “To be clear, we do not condone any sort of profit from botnets or malware for that matter, but the vast majority of what is constituted as cyber crime can be something as simple as downloading your favorite song, instead of paying ridiculous fees for that song (which the artist will only see a fraction of).”