The multiplayer servers for EA’s hit shooter Battlefield 3 are not fully functional due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack.

Developer DICE is attempting to counter the attack by updating and improving its servers. In posts on its message boards, DICE says it doesn’t know why its game is under attack, and it will continue to work to get the game working properly.

“We have been working around the clock to mitigate the impact of an ongoing denial-of-service attack on our Battlefield 3 game infrastructure over the last several days,” reads a post from the DICE team. “While the motives are unclear, the focus of the attack has been interference with network communications preventing access to multiplayer gameplay.”

We’ve reached out to EA to ask if it knows who is responsible for the attack. We will update with its response.

The studio went on to assure fans that this blunt-force attack has not compromised user data.

A DDoS attack is when a person or a group of people use software to make repeated requests on a server. If enough requests are made, it will overwhelm the server and cause it to begin spitting out errors. It doesn’t require any hacking skills, but a coordinated attack like this does need a lot of different PCs all running the software at the same time.

That suggests this is either a group of people or that someone is hiding the code for the attack in other software.

“As a part of our efforts to resolve these issues, we’ve conducted rolling restarts of Battlefield infrastructure to apply some updates,” the Battlefield forum post reads. “Thank you for your patience and support while we work to get everyone back and playing Battlefield 3 as soon as possible.”

DICE promises to provide more updates as it makes progress.

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For the third time this month, Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox fell to distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) today. Some people just aren’t down with alternative currencies, it seems.

The company wrote on its Facebook:

This again appears to be another strong DDoS attack. We are working hard to overcome it and will update when possible. It’s currently 2am in Japan so please forgive us if our Facebook/Twitter updates are not as quick, though the team is certainly not taking any breaks.

Bitcoin is a decentralized Internet currency that has earned much more legitimacy in the last year. Mt. Gox acts as the main marketplace for Bitcoin, but the exchange has been known for its hiccups in times of heavy traffic. Indeed, Bitcoin’s price often fluctuates after Mt. Gox performance issues. Most recently Bitcoins fell 40 percent from $260 per Bitcoin when Mt. Gox went silent in a previous DDoS attack.

It seems the attacks started around 7:40 this morning Pacific time. The company says it is trying to implement stronger protections against these attacks. At the time of writing this post, Mt. Gox looks to be up and functional, though no further updates have come from the company.

Bitcoin’s relevancy may be more influenced by Mt. Gox than we think, says VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig. Mt. Gox will need to get stronger and more reliable before Bitcoins can really make their place in the world.

hat tip The Next Web; Bitcoin image via zcopley/Flickr

That’s the experience for many Reddit users today, as the site has been under attack by a flood of traffic — a distributed denial of service attack — that has rendered the social site’s servers struggling to keep up.

There’s not a lot of information available in terms of who is responsible, as no one has stepped forward claiming credit and Reddit only knows right now that it’s still under attack:

Site availability continues to be impacted by a malicious DDoS attack.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

Partial service has been restored — I could read the home page — and Reddit is informing those members who are able to connect that they may experience problems gaining access to all the parts of the site:

One thing seems to be clear: The outages are deliberate, not simply caused by a flood of traffic from the ongoing Boston manhunt for the marathon bomber who remains at large. One apparent Reddit employee, “alienth,” said that “the load from the Boston incident was measurable. The attack which is ongoing is orders of magnitude larger. We’re mitigating it the best we can.”

Reddit’s doing a pretty good job as the site seems to be mostly available now, if slow:

We’ve mitigated part of the DDoS at this time. However, certain site functions are disabled.

— reddit status (@redditstatus) April 19, 2013

Image credit: Reddit

Anonymous, the unorganized hacker organization that has attacked everyone from North Korea to SendGrid to you name it, decided it needed better news capability than Your Anon News, which currently depends on Tumblr and Twitter, can provide. So Your Anon News decided to crowdfund a new Anonymous news agency via Indiegogo … which was then promptly DDOS’d by — presumably — Anonymous.

Of course, when I’m saying “it decided,” that’s not strictly accurate. Your Anon News says it supports Anonymous, but is not officially speaking part of Anonymous. Realistically, however, no one is officially a part of Anonymous, and the edges of the unorganized organization are so frayed as to make it impossible to determine who or what actually is part or not part of it.

In any case, some in Anonymous decided the Indiegogo campaign was not kosher and promptly went nuclear, kicking off a Distributed Denial of Service attack on all of Indiegogo to disrupt it.

UPDATE: Yesterday’s DDoS attack was on the Your Anon News campaign (ow.ly/jLaxS). We don’t yet know who the attackers were.

— Indiegogo (@Indiegogo) April 4, 2013

Indiegogo has fought through the attack, and the campaign, far from being disrupted, has been very successful. With 12 days left in its campaign, Your Anon News has raised $9,857, almost five times its original $2,000 goal. Apparently, the crowd is beating the bullies.

One funny note: As TechCrunch’s John Biggs notes, the Your Anon News contribution perks are lame in the extreme — buttons, mugs, and T-shirts. In other words, just the same as every other campaign’s.

Why not be a little creative?

For $1,000, we’ll hack the Department of Justice. For $5,000, the FBI. And for a platinum-level contribution of $10,000, we’ll hack the CIA and finally reveal the truth about Area 51.

Now that would be something more interesting.

Here’s Your Anon News contribution-seeking video, which sounds like it was narrated by a Mac’s text-to-speech:

Me neither.

That hasn’t stopped the BBC from claiming ”Global Internet slows after biggest attack in history,” or the UK’s Independent from saying that “Internet services across the world have been disrupted” with “millions of web users” not able to access service like Netflix.

According to the Internet Traffic Report, everything’s fairly copacetic. Response time has been pretty steady for the past 30 days, with no discernible dip in the past week, and packet loss globally has remained steady at almost zero:

Source: Internet Traffic Report

Internet traffic doesn’t seem very disrupted in the past month or week …

A quick check of InternetPulse shows that the U.S. Internet is all healthy, with sub-90-second latency in response times across the board today:

It’s not until we check Akamai’s global real-time web monitor that we see what the problem is: congestion is up in two general areas. Those would be the UK — where the BBC lives — and Germany/Netherlands, where a local fight is on between a controversial hosting provider, Cyberbunker, and a spam-fighting filter service, Spamhaus.

Essentially, it appears that Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker for allegedly distributing spam, and friends of Cyberbunker then attacked Spamhaus’ servers with up to 300 gigabytes/second of data. That’s an enormous amount of data, and it constitutes the biggest-ever DDOS attack. It’s clogging the interweb’s tubes in at least a few places but not, apparently, all over the world.

Little hint to the BBC and others: Western Europe is not the world.

After hearing several jokes about forking software repositories and “big dongles,” SendGrid’s developer evangelist Adria Richards tweeted a picture of the jokesters with the hashtag “pycon.” Conference organizers saw the tweet, ejected the developers, and in short order, PlayHaven fired one of the accused.

Full story: Playhaven developer fired for sexual jokes after SendGrid marketer outs him on Twitter

Update: Adria Richards’ statement

Then the Internet erupted … or at least some fraction of the male developer portion of it. Richards received rape and death threats on Twitter, the fired developer published about the incident on Hacker News, and at least one Twitter user felt so strongly about the case that he made a 10-minute video explaining his aggressive and potentially abusive tweets aimed at Richards and posted it on Tumblr.

Today, SendGrid, the email delivery company where Richards works, is under a DDOS attack.

So are the idiots now DDoS’ing SendGrid because of #pycon? YOU ARE BREAKING THE INTERNET YOU FOOLS

— Tane Piper (@tanepiper) March 21, 2013

A DDOS attack basically shuts down a website or Internet service by flooding it with traffic. Communication requests from a distributed pool of computers — often in a botnet controlled by a hacker — occupy the site’s servers and make it impossible for the site to continue.

So SendGrid.com is currently inaccessible, and that’s not the only problem: At least some developers are cancelling their accounts with the service.

Canceled my accout with @sendgrid today. I cannot do business with someone who supports a woman who gets a father fired over a joke #freedom

— Pj(@pjmprometheus) March 21, 2013

SendGrid posted about the incident — apparently trying to calm the furor — but says that mail is still being sent. I’m trying to contact the company for more information and Adria Richards for her perspective on this entire situation.

We hear you, internet. We’re working to serve our customers at the moment. Further comments, once we’ve done our job of delivering email ^tf

— SendGrid (@SendGrid) March 21, 2013

Adria Richards’ personal site, But You’re A Girl, is also under DDOS attack but is currently being protected by CloudFlare. That’s something her company might want to consider as well.

Interestingly, PlayHaven.com, the company that fired the developer, is working just fine.

photo credit: mafate69 via photopin cc

Updated 3:45 p.m.

Raspberry Pi’s website went black after unknown hackers brought it down with a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS). The website has since been restored.

“For those interested, this one’s quite hardcore: We’re seeing a SYN flood from a botnet that seems to have about a million nodes,” said Raspberry Pi on Twitter. “This is the second attack in a couple of days. We haven’t had the blackmail email yet. It’s getting plonked when it arrives.”

During the attack, the company actively tweeted accounts of the attack, saying they were unable to trace it back to its creator. This, according to Raspberry Pi, is due to the attackers using a “SYN flood” to mask their identities. It believes the attacker is likely an “angry and confused kid” who won’t be able to hold up an expensive attack like this for very much longer.

The company is also unable to get in touch with its host given that it is nighttime in the U.K., where Raspberry Pi is based.

The general question on Twitter concerning the DDOS is “Why?” Raspberry Pi creates cheap micro PCs, which has caught the eye of many. Its foundation arm is also focused on bringing computer science education to children and is involved in other charities.

When asked about why it might be a target, Raspberry Pi tweeted, “Well, we *are* horrid, what with our focus on education and charity and everything. Boo to irritating do-gooders.”

Raspberry Pi image via Flickr

In an ironic twist this morning, CloudFlare, a company that speeds up and protects websites, suffered an outage that also took down the 785,000 sites using its service, including Wikileaks and 4Chan.

A change pushed out to the company’s routers ended up crashing them, TechCrunch reports. Chief executive Matthew Prince (above) told the site, “If you sent a packet to one of our IP addresses, you would get back a response that there was no router.” The outage lasted for almost an hour.

CloudFlare serves as a line of defense between its customers and web visitors, which allows it to cache sites for better page loading performance, and also makes it difficult to take down sites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. But that also means if CloudFlare goes down, so does its customers.

The company runs 23 data centers globally, all of which were affected by the outage. “These data centers are connected to the rest of the Internet using routers,” Prince explained in a blog post this morning. “These routers announce the path that, from any point on the Internet, packets should use to reach our network. When a router goes down, the routes to the network that sits behind the router are withdrawn from the rest of the Internet.”

CloudFlare’s troubles began when it noticed that one of its customers was being targeted for a DDoS attack. A CloudFlare team member ended up creating a rule for its Juniper routers to block the attacker’s unusually large packets. But instead of simply accepting the rule, the routers ended up consuming all of their RAM when they encountered it.

Prince detailed how the company responded to the widespread outage in his blog post:

CloudFlare’s ops and network teams were aware of the incident immediately because of both internal and external monitors we run on our network. While it wasn’t initially clear the reason the routers had crashed, it was clear that it was an issue caused by an inability for packets to find a route to our network. We were able to access some routers and see that they were crashing when they encountered this bad rule. We removed the rule and then called the network operations teams in the data centers where our routers were unresponsive to ask them to physically access the routers and perform a hard reboot.

“This is a completely unacceptable event to us,” Prince told TechCrunch. “In our four years of life, this is our third significant outage,” he added.

San Francisco-based CloudFlare has raised around $22 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, Pelion Venture Partners, and Venrock.

Update: Juniper issued the following statement:

Juniper Networks is aware of and investigating a reported network outage with one of our customers, Cloudflare. While we have not completed our investigation, we believe this incident was triggered by a product issue that Juniper identified last October, when a patch was also made available. Our customer support team is actively supporting Cloudflare in its efforts to resolve the issue and we are not aware of any other customers experiencing similar issues.

People are reaching out to the President this week, asking the White House to recognize distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as a form of protest rather than a punishable offense.

DDoS attacks are used to overwhelm a website and knock it offline. They do this by sending lots of traffic to a website’s server, effectively overloading it. The method is often used by “hactivist groups” such as Anonymous, who focus their hacking efforts not on financial gain, but rather on political protest.

The petition states that:

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), is not any form of hacking in any way. It is the equivalent of repeatedly hitting the refresh button on a webpage. It is, in that way, no different than any “occupy” protest. Instead of a group of people standing outside a building to occupy the area, they are having their computer occupy a website to slow (or deny) service of that particular website for a short time.

Not everyone will agree, however. While picket lines and sit-ins discourage people from entering a retailer or business, they doesn’t deny them access wholesale. If a website is knocked offline, then any potential revenue is completely lost, not just scared away.

At the time of writing this post, the petition has 1,438 signatures, and needs 23,562 more in order to reach the necessary 25,000 signature limit to be considered by the White House.

The petition also requests that anyone who has been punished or jailed for DDoS attacks should be “immediately released” and have their records wiped clean of the related offenses.

via Ars Technica; Protester image via Shutterstock

If you looked at a graph of denial of service attacks, you’d likely see a hockey stick of growth in 2011, according to research by DDOS-protection company Prolexic.

Denial of service attacks work by flooding a website with as much traffic as possible, eventually causing it to overload and shut itself down. It has become a favorite tactic among hacktivists, such as Anonymous, which have used DDOS attacks to take down websites such as the CIA’s and The Pirate Bay.

Prolexic says between the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010, DDOS attacks increased eight percent. However, when the company looked at the fourth quarter of 2010 and 2011, there was a 153 percent uptick. Dramatic, no?

Prolexic also realized that hackers preferred to attack web applications in 2010, but now they’re targeting the actual infrastructure, the network, to take down a website. In 2011, the average DDOS attack lasted 80 hours, at 185,404 packets per second, according to Prolexic’s research.

This season, Prolexic is particularly concerned for online retailers — particularly those without physical locations. Minutes offline can definitely impact a business’ bottom line, especially as we come closer and closer to days like Black Friday and the holiday season in general.

The company also provides a “DDOS downtime cost calculator” that shows businesses how much one of these attack would cost them.

DDOS image via Shutterstock

Hacker group Anonymous targeted United Kingdom government websites today in a show of solidarity with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is holed up at the Ecuardorian embassy in London, hoping to flee the U.K. for fear of being extradited to Sweden and then the United States.

The hacker collective, famous for using distributed denial of service attacks to make a political point, allegedly attacked the U.K. Justice Department website, along with the British Prime Minister’s website “Number 10.” Other reports indicate the group has also attacked the Department of Work and Pensions. Anonymous used the hash tag “#OpFreeAssange,” referencing the founder of Wikileaks who is supposed to be under house arrest in the U.K. for sex-crime allegations in Sweden.

Earlier today, one Anonymous bullhorn on Twitter, @AnonIRC said, “The website of the UK Ministry of Justice is down: http://www.justice.gov.uk/  #OpFreeAssange”

Another, @YourAnonNews, tweeted, “The second victim seems to be offline –> http://www.dwp.gov.uk/  #OpFreeAssange #Anonymous. Gov. of UK Expect Us!”

After being arrested and let out on bail, Assange escaped to the Ecuadorian embassy before authorities could extradite him to Sweden. The Latin American country granted Assange political asylum last week, saying his human rights were in danger. Officials in Ecuador spoke with Sweden but were not able to get assurances that Assange would not be extradited from there to the United States, where he faces bigger charges for the leak of many U.S. diplomatic cables in 2010.

As of now, the U.K. Justice department website is still down, though Number 10 and the Department of Work and Pensions websites are up.

This morning Assange gave a speech from a balcony at the Ecuadorian embassy. He urged the U.S. to end its “witch hunt” against Wikileaks. He said that the U.S. is at a juncture: “Will it return to and reaffirm the revolutionary values it was founded on or will it lurch off the precipice, dragging us all into a dangerous and oppressive world in which journalists fall silent under the fear of prosecution and citizens must whisper in the dark?”

hat tip The Register; Julian Assange Anonymous image via Takver/Flickr

Wikileaks has been down for five days now, the result of a massive distributed denial of service attack hitting the website.

This is not the first time Wikileaks has been the target of a DDOS attack. The website was down for four days in May due to the same type of attack. As ZDNet notes, a group called AntiLeaks says it’s behind the attack, indentifying themselves as “young adults, citizens of the United States of America.” They further explained:

“[Wikileaks creater Julian] Assange is the head of a new breed of terrorist. We are doing this as a protest against his attempt to escape justice into Ecuador. This would be a catalyst for many more like him to rise up in his place. We will not stop and they will not stop us.”

Wikileaks is a controversial website that often posts proprietary information that has more than likely been uncovered without permission. The organization famously leaked U.S. State Department war cables that included a number of embarrassing and secret pieces of information the government did not want disclosed.

Most recently, Wikileaks released e-mails from security think-tank Stratfor after the company was hacked. The e-mails, if they were real, show racist internal nicknames for various people and groups, such as ““Hizzies” for members of Hezbollah and “Adogg” for referencing Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In July, Wikileaks released what it called the “Syria Files,” or a number of government e-mails showing the “inner workings of the Syrian government.”

via ZDNet; Julian Assange image via New Media Days/Peter Erichsen

Two U.K.-based youngsters believed to be a part of the LulzSec hacking group pleaded guilty to attacking the CIA website, the U.S. Air Force Agency website controlled by the Pentagon, along with a slew of others in a U.K. court today.

Cleary, 20, pleaded guilty, along with fellow LulzSec member Jake Davis, 19, to two counts of “unauthorized act or acts with intent to impair or with recklessness as to impairing, the operation of a computer or computers” per the U.K. CyberCrime Law. That is, the two admitted to using distributed denial of service attacks to take down a number of websites including  that of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency website. A distributed denial of service attack, or DDOS, shuts down a website by blasting packets of information in the thousands to overload the server, eventually causing the system to crash. We’ve seen hacking groups such as LulzSec and Anonymous use this tactic to take down, and occasionally deface websites.

Cleary also pleaded guilty to aiding an attack on the U.S. Air Force Agency website.

Davis was a well-known figure around the LulzSec/Anonymous community codenamed “Topiary.” His arrest spurred a number of these attacks done for the “Free Topiary” cause. If convicted, the two face up to 25 years in jail.

Other websites mentioned in the case included Westboro Baptist Church, HBGary, and PBS. The hack on Westboro Baptist Church stirred the pot when a hacker called into a live interview with one of the church’s leaders and hacked the website on the spot. The hack of security company HBGary was also a headliner, when the group took down the site and posted 71,000 company e-mails to the Web.

Cleary and Davis, however, are both pleading not guilty to counts of stealing proprietary information during these hacks and publishing them. Other arrested members, 25-year-old Ryan Ackroyd (otherwise known as lolspoon, or Kayla) and an unnamed 17-year old, plead not guilty to DDOSing. The two will be tried in court on April 8, 2013.

Cleary was originally arrested a year ago in June 2011 for violation of the Computer Misuse Act. He was taken by the Metropolitan Police to a central London station while police searched his house, finding “a significant amount of material.” He was recently indicted by the United States for his hacking activities, though it is reported that the U.S. will wait until after the U.K. proceeding to take further action.

via The Telegraph; LulzSec image via openfly/Flickr

Eager content-deprived pirates were flummoxed on Wednesday by the news that The Pirate Bay had been taken offline by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

While suspicions were almost immediately leveled at the hacktivist group Anonymous, The Pirate Bay quickly denied the group’s involvement.

But one decidedly anti-Pirate Bay hacker named “Nyre” who is taking responsibility, ZDNet reports.

“The Pirate Bay was a press-release website for Anonymous, then I had a idea, why not take it down? Why not make it impossible for Anonymous?” Nyre said in a post on PasteBin titled “The Reason“.  (Nyre, was, of course, slightly off-base with his assessment. The Pirate Bay and Anonymous aren’t exactly allies, having disagreed on a variety of fronts.)

Nyre initially said his intention was to keep the site down for a week, but the hacker didn’t quite meet his ambitions.

So, to recap: The Pirate Bay wasn’t taken down by Anonymous. It was, however, taken down by a rogue former agent of Anonymous, who now hates Anonymous and Pirate Bay equally, more or less. It’s a narrative that James Bond creator Ian Flemming would be proud of.

As for The Pirate Bay itself, the site is celebrating its return with a special phoenix-themed home page. Let the piracy re-commence.

Hacker photo via Shutterstock

Ustream is undergoing what chief executive Brad Hunstable says is the “largest and most coordinated DDOS attack Ustream has ever seen” today, and the team is pissed. The attack is rumored to be an attempt to censor a Russian citizen journalist reporting on protests in the county.

“We’re a business, we lost a lot money today,” said Hunstable (pictured above) in an interview with VentureBeat. “This was on a scale that I’m not sure many websites would be able to fight off. This was one of the biggest denial of service attacks on the Internet.”

Live video of protests in Russia on Ustream’s homepage

A denial of service attack is when an individual or group of individuals attempt to access a website at hyper speeds, clogging up the network and eventually bringing the tired website down. Hunstable and his Ustream team have dealt with two previous denial of service attacks pertaining to citizen journalists streaming video of protests in Russia since the reelection of President Vladimir Putin. The first two DDOS attacks, which occurred on December 6th 2011 and January 6th 2012, were not at the scale of today’s.

Hunstable is not taking this lying down, however. Within the last hour (since the writing of this post) Ustream finally got back up and the team is squarely featuring the Russian citizen journalist, ReggaMortis1, on its homepage. It’s a veritable “don’t mess with my users” move, which Hunstable (who mentioned he was a West Point graduate) said could turn into a full fledged Russian website tomorrow.

“We’re going to huddle up late tonight and take a step back and figure out what we can do differently,” Hunstable said. “I told my guys, I want us to roll out a Russian Ustream tomorrow.”

The team got a tip-off from a Russian user who revealed two names of suspected attackers. Riots have broken out across Russia. Putin, who was recently reelected to Russia’s leadership was inaugurated this past Monday.

“We may not agree with what [all our users] have to say, but in my opinion everyone has the right to speak,” Hustable told us. “Today you could summarize that there was an attack on Internet freedom.”

Update: Ustream had made good on its threat, and its first go at a Russian channel, with localized and translated content, is now live and can be found at ustream.tv/russia.

Brad Hunstable image via PoliticalActivityLaw.com/Flickr

The Department of Justice has charged popular file-sharing web site Megaupload with a “mega conspiracy” that, it alleges, netted the company’s executives a vast cache of money and luxury cars.

The indictment (see below for the full text in Scribd) refers to Megaupload’s offenses as the “Mega Conspiracy.” The company has been charged with five different counts concerning copyright infringement and money laundering. According to the indictment, Megaupload’s offenses include:

1. Running Megavideo.com, which streams copyright infringed television shows and movies
2. “Willfully reproduced and distributed” copyrighted content on its servers
3. Offering money as an incentive to upload infringing content between the dates of Septmeber 2005 and July 2011
4. Not terminating copyright offending accounts, as it states it can do in the Megaupload terms of service
5. “Made no significant effort to identify users” of the site, uploaders of copyrighted content, or the content itself

If found guilty, the defendants could spend up to 20 years in jail and might be liable for up to $175 million in fines.

“It’s really that inducement scenario that harkens back to the days of Napster,” said Owen Seitel of Idell & Sietel LLP, an entertainment and IP law firm. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the site totally shut down and never came back.”

By inducement, Seitel is referring to the action of offering financial compensation in exchange for uploading copyrighted content. On big sites like these, he explained, there is bound to be copyrighted material floating on the servers. But there are “safe harbors” that third-party content sites can take to protect themselves. One of these is complying with “notice and take down structures,” or flagging when copyrighted content comes into the system and then removing it. According to the indictment, Megaupload did not comply by flagging or removing content.

What’s really eye-opening about this indictment is the property that the Feds have seized from the defendants. It lists a number of bank accounts, PayPal accounts, 15 Mercedes-Benz vehicles, a Rolls-Royce with the license plate “GOD,” a rare Lamborghini and a Maserati. It seems the defendants had a number of vehicles with creative license plates including “HACKER,” “POLICE,” “STONED,” “GOOD,” “CEO,” and the ominous “GUILTY.” (See below for the full list.)

In addition, the indictment alleges the company or its associates spent a total of almost $8 million on yacht rentals in the Mediterranean from April to June 2011.

Seitel explained “indictments by their nature are overreaching” and that these allegations should be taken with a grain of salt.

Prior to being shut down by the DOJ, Megaupload released a statement calling the accusation of mass copyright-infringement “grotesquely overblown.” Indeed, a number of music celebrities have come out in support of Megaupload, prior to today’s events. The company’s new CEO, Swizz Beatz, is a musical artist himself and is married to singer Alicia Keys.

“It doesn’t surpise me to see celebrities on the side of the people when they’ve already been paid,” said Seitel, “It’s really not their content getting ripped off, it’s the studios’.”

In response to the indictment, hacker collective Anonymous took down the Department of Justice’s website, along with other music label sites. According to a tweet by @YourAnonNews, an impressive 5,635 Anonymous members contributed to the site attacks. It is rumored the group is planning to attack WhiteHouse.gov. The take down tactic being used is called LOIC, otherwise known as a low orbit ion cannon. LOIC is a public system that can be used to perform denial of service attacks.

The five different counts Megaupload faces include conspiracy to commit racketeering, conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, conspiracy to commit money laundering, criminal copyright infringement by distributing a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution on a computer network & aiding and abetting of criminal copyright infringement, and criminal copyright infringement by electronic means & aiding and abetting of criminal copyright infringement.

Here’s the full list of seized goods, not counting bank accounts:

• 2010 Maserati GranCabrio, VIN ZAMKM45B000051328, License Plate No. “M-FB 212” or “DH-GC 470”, registered to FINN BATATO;
• 2009 Mercedes-Benz E500 Coupe, VIN WDD20737225019582, License Plate No. “FEG690”;
• 2005 Mercedes-Benz CLK DTM, VIN WDB2093422F165517, License Plate No. “GOOD”;
• 2004 Mercedes-Benz CLK DTM AMG 5.5L Kompressor, VIN WDB2093422F166073, License Plate No. “EVIL”;
• 2010 Mercedes-Benz S65 AMG L, VIN WDD2211792A324354, License Plate No. “CEO”;
• 2008 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drop Head Coupe, VIN SCA2D68096UH07049; License Plate No. “GOD”;
• 2010 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG, VIN WDD2120772A103834, License Plate No. “STONED”;
• 2010 Mini Cooper S Coupe, VIN WMWZG32000TZ03651, License Plate No. “V”;
• 2010 Mercedes-Benz ML63 AMG, VIN WDC1641772A608055, License Plate No. “GUILTY”;
• 2007 Mercedes-Benz CL65 AMG, VIN WDD2163792A025130, License Plate No. “KIMCOM”;
• 2009 Mercedes-Benz ML63 AMG, VIN WDC1641772A542449, License Plate No. “MAFIA”;
• 2010 Toyota Vellfire, VIN 7AT0H65MX11041670, License Plate Nos. “WOW” or “7”;
• 2011 Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG, VIN WDB4632702X193395, License Plate Nos. “POLICE” or “GDS672”;
• 2011 Toyota Hilux, VIN MR0FZ29G001599926, License Plate No. “FSN455”;
• Harley Davidson Motorcycle, VIN 1HD1HPH3XBC803936, License Plate No. “36YED”;
• 2010 Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG, VIN WDD2163742A026653, License Plate No. “HACKER”;
• 2005 Mercedes-Benz A170, VIN WDD1690322J184595, License Plate No. “FUR252”;
• 2005 Mercedes-Benz ML500, VIN WDC1641752A026107, License Plate No. DFF816;
• Fiberglass sculpture, imported from the United Kingdom with Entry No. 83023712;
• 1957 Cadillac El Dorado, VIN 5770137596;
• 2010 Sea-Doo GTX Jet Ski, VIN YDV03103E010;
• 1959 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible, VIN 59F115669;
• Von Dutch Kustom Motor Bike, VIN 1H9S14955BB451257;
• 2006 Mercedes-Benz CLK DTM, VIN WDB2094421T067269;
• 2010 Mini Cooper S Coupe, VIN WMWZG32000TZ03648 License Plate No. “T”;
• 1989 Lamborghini LM002, VIN ZA9LU45AXKLA12158, License Plate No. “FRP358”
• 2011 Mercedes-Benz ML63, VIN 4JGBB7HB0BA666219;
• Samsung 820DXN 82” LCD TV;
• Samsung 820DXN 82” LCD TV;
• Samsung 820DXN 82” LCD TV;
• Devon Works LLC, Tread #1 time piece;
• Artwork, In High Spirits, Olaf Mueller photos from The Cat Street Gallery;
• Sharp 108” LCD Display TV;
• Sharp 108” LCD Display TV;
• Sony PMW-F3K Camera S/N 0200231;
• Sony PMW-F3K Camera S/N 0200561;
• Artwork, Predator Statue;
• Artwork, Christian Colin;
• Artwork, Anonymous Hooded Sculpture;
• 2009 Mercedes-Benz ML350 CDI 4MATIC Off-Roader;
• Sharp LC-65XS1M 65” LCD TV;
• Sharp LC-65XS1M 65” LCD TV;
• TVLogic 56” LUM56W TV;
• Sixty (60) Dell R710 computer servers.

Check out the Megaupload indictment on Scribd, or read it in the embedded window below:

Repossessed image via Shutterstock

Occupy Wall Street encampments across the U.S. have been dismantled by police actions, and as cold weather sets in, the movement will have to change its tactics if it is to survive. The smartphone apps that have been helpful in facilitating communication will play a pivotal role as protesters regroup and update their strategies.

But while some app developers welcome the attention, a throng of new users isn’t always welcome for those who would rather not be associated with a political movement. Remaining unaligned can minimize the risk of alienating users, and help to avoid the scrutiny of authority figures.

We’ve looked at three smart phone apps Occupy Wall Street protesters have been using to organize, and how the developers are reacting to their popularity.

Protest4

Protest4 is a location-based app that lets you search for protests in progress or start your own. The app is tied to your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that you can see where people in your network are when the action heats up, and it makes it easy for you to share information with your networks from the scene of an event. Like other apps being used by protesters, Protest4 doesn’t require much personal information about you, just a first name.

Protest4 recently welcomed its 50,000th member, and all the attention brought about an unwelcome distributed denial of service attack (DDoS), as co-founder and lead business developer Jim Kent told VentureBeat in an email.

Beyond the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S., Protest4 has been embraced by free speech movements and political demonstrations in Indonesia, Pakistan Egypt, and even Italy, where Prime Miniester Silvio Berlusconi recently resigned.

The team that built Protest4 has a business plan in place, even while Kent says that Protest4 will always be free to download and use. Protest4 was built on top of the back-end for the Zapon app, an open source messaging platform developed to connect fans of cricket, fashion or any related topic. The experience of developing Protest4 and seeing its growth shoot through the roof will be invaluable when customizing a Zapon-powered product for paid users.

GO HD

Go HD is a free messaging app for the iPhone that officially launched last week, and was created by Los Angeles design studio Hollr. With GO, people can upload and share anonymous location-based messages, photos and videos.

The GO app is wrapped up in a gorgeous package, with three simple options for sharing: “Snap, Shoot, Speak,” to capture photos, film a video, or post a tweet. A nifty map overlay lets users track anonymous sharing activity by location, or search by hash tag.

GO has scraped away much of the social aspects of content sharing so that the message is the focus, as opposed to the messenger.

“Regardless of status, we are equals in that we share the experience and are speaking to the world, versus followers,”  Justin Dionisio, the creative behind the Go app, told VentureBeat. Speed and functionality are emphasized over any narcissistic desire for recognition.

“Something is always happening,” the company writes on its website, and celebrations, rallies, riots and other events could also be good opportunities to use GO.

The company embraces the Occupy Wall Street,  as seen by the screen shots included on the iTunes App Store, but it will be an uphill struggle to see how the company broadens its appeal.

WhatsApp

While Occupy Wall Street protesters may be rattling the nerves of bank executives and elected officials in Washington D.C., WhatsApp likely has telecom company’s knees knocking.

The 99 cent messaging app for iPhone and Android devices was recently called “the smartphone success story that’s never been told,” according to Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times. The app allows users to send unlimited text messages, so they can avoid paying SMS texting fees. Bradshaw speculates that WhatsApp could do to SMS on mobile phones what Skype did to international calling.

Besides the fact that the app is almost laughably cheap to download, all messages are encrypted, so sensitive communication between two users cannot not be tied to individuals if it were to be intercepted by snoops.

The app recently exceeded 1 billion messages per day, which was no doubt buoyed by protest related activity. However, the extent to which any uprising could fuel such growth is debatable. The company parsed the 1 billion messages milestone in a blog post:

Just how much is 1 billion messages? That is 41,666,667 messages an hour, 694,444 messages a minute, and 11,574 messages a second.

1 billion messages a day is a significant milestone and also a small step closer towards our goal: providing a great mobile messaging system for a global market, regardless of your handset.

WhatsApp has distanced itself from any association with the Occupy Wall Street movement, but that hasn’t stopped various media outlets from pointing out the obvious.

When contacted for this story, company representatives referred VentureBeat to the blog post mentioned above, but would not comment specifically.  WhatsApp is also available on Windows Phone, Blackberry and Symbian devices.

Conclusion

There are good reasons why mobile app developers might wish to align themselves with the Occupy Wall Street  protests, or inject a little distance. While GO HD and Protest4, as relatively new ventures, could use the exposure, WhatsApp is already sitting pretty with a large group of customers. The company raised $8 million from Sequoia in April, and the company and its investors clearly have their sites set on larger prizes than being popular among political agitators. And there are certain risks associated as well.

During the Tunisian uprising, Facebook discovered its servers had been hacked by an organization with ties to the Tunisian government, and user information had be compromised. Certainly in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, Facebook and other social media platforms have been instrumental as organizing tools, just as they have been for protesters in the U.S. While Twitter and Google were very vocal in their support of pro-democracy movements in the Middle East, Facebook was seen as not wanting to jeopardize potential expansion into China, the world’s largest Internet market, but also one that is notoriously censored.

While teams behind the apps popular with protesters have expressed varying levels of support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, Protest4′s Kent says that distancing your product from a social movement can only do so much. Any social media tool is, in principle, usable by activists whose agendas you may or may not be comfortable with.

“To a certain extent, all social media products have that risk,” Kent said.

Image Credit: Saint Huck/Flickr

Both the main website for the government of Brazil and the office of the President of Brazil were offline when VentureBeat tried to access the accounts. Both sites were taken down by LulzSecBrazil, a subgroup of the hacker group that has made headlines recently for several high-profile attacks and for its sassy attitude toward the public with public releases and Tweets.

“TANGO DOWN brasil.gov.br and presidencia.gov.br LulzSecBrazil,” LulzSec said on its main Twitter account. “Our Brazilian unit is making progress. Well done @LulzSecBrazil, brothers!”

Hacker group Anonymous also posted a video that criticized the Brazilian government’s manipulation of information. The hacker group demanded that the Brazilian government be more transparent about its actions. LulzSec and Anonymous recently launched “Operation AntiSec,” a call to arms asking hackers everywhere to attack government websites and deface them.

The group said it is hacking websites like CIA.gov for fun, rather than for political reasons. But recent activities by the group are reminiscent of tactics employed by hacker group Anonymous, a group known for digging for personal information and posting it on the web in retaliation for attacks on its members. The group recently outed two “snitches” that might have led to the arrest of a 19-year-old U.K. man suspected of cooperating with LulzSec.

LulzSec said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become known as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to those made by Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed.

The new release recalls tactics employed by hacker group Anonymous, a group known for digging for personal information and posting it on the web in retaliation for attacks on its members. LulzSec actually began working with Anonymous recently when they launched “Operation AntiSec” — a call to arms asking hackers everywhere to attack government websites and deface them.

Ryan Cleary, a 19-year-old UK man, was arrested for his suspected involvement with LulzSec. The release by LulzSec includes physical addresses based on Internet Protocol addresses for each individual that might have turned over information about Cleary. It also included each individual’s real name and the screen name the individuals used when communicating with LulzSec members. The group claims that the individuals they outed are guilty of cyber crimes.

“These goons begged us for mercy after they apologized to us all night for leaking some of our affiliates’ logs. There is no mercy on The Lulz Boat,” the group said in an official announcement. “Snitches get stitches.”

Earlier on Tuesday, a security firm claimed it has assembled a profile of LulzSec and may have identified several members of the group.

Imperva claims that there are 10 or fewer hackers within LulzSec, a group that seems to have spun off from Anonymous, another high-profile hacker group. The group uses web vulnerabilities to attack sites with SQL injection attacks and distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), the report said. One of the hackers also owns a botnet — a massive army of slave computers — that could be used to conduct a DDoS attack. The Guardian also published several handles of the hackers that the security firm identified as members of LulzSec.

LulzSec and Anonymous recently launched “Operation AntiSec,” a call to arms asking hackers everywhere to attack government websites and deface them. It also marked the first time that LulzSec publicly cooperated with Anonymous. The two groups have been at odds since LulzSec began attacking several video games and publicly taunting 4chan.org users.

An upload Monday to Pastebin, a site for posting anonymous documents, claimed that LulzSec had acquired the UK Census records and was “keeping them under lock and key.” The group quickly denied that it was involved in the attack. The same day that the group denied the attack, Ryan Cleary, a 19-year-old UK man, was arrested for his suspected involvement with LulzSec.

LulzSec said it is hacking websites like CIA.gov for fun, rather than for political reasons. The group also said there was a lot of information, taken from the networks it had broken into, that the group had not publicly released. It has released a lot of sensitive data and passwords taken from users of various sites like CIA.gov.

LulzSec said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become known as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to those made  by Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed.

LulzSec previously broke into the Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.”It also said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. Members of the LulzSec group were also able to break into the PBS site recently and post a fake story saying that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive.

The hacktivist groups launched Operation Anti-Security, which encourages hackers around the world to attack government websites and deface them. It also marks the first time that LulzSec has publicly cooperated with Anonymous, another high-profile hacking group. The two groups have been at odds since LulzSec began attacking several video games and publicly taunting 4chan.org users. Anonymous is a loosely-associated collection of hackers that routinely takes up politically- and morally-charged causes.

“Attention #Media: about #Lulzsec and #Anonymous, we are not at war. We are bros of teh internetz. Also, /b/ != Anonymous,” hacking group Anonymous said on its Twitter account.

LulzSec said it is hacking websites like CIA.gov for fun, rather than for political reasons. The group also said there was a lot of information taken from the networks it had broken into that the group had not publicly released. It has released a lot of sensitive data and passwords taken from users of various sites like CIA.gov. This will be the first operation that is politically and morally motivated that LulzSec has participated in.

LulzSec said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become known as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed.

Lulzsec previously broke into the Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.” It also said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. Members of the LulzSec group were also able to break into the PBS site recently and post a fake story saying that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The hacking group has been gleefully attacking a lot of gaming networks such as online role-playing game EVE Online and indie sandbox game Minecraft. But LulzSec hackers have also avoided sabotaging certain games that have niche appeal in the gaming community -— indicating the group has some kind of agenda outside of its goal of wanton destruction on the web.

The group broke into Bethesda Softworks and could have taken information regarding 200,000 Brink players, who play an online first-person shooter game that includes parkour-style movement, but chose not to do so. That game was not rated well by critics, but has a cult following among some gamers. The group also publicly offered assistance to Sega, which was recently hit by attacks from an unknown hacking group.

“@Sega - contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down,” LulzSec said on its main Twitter account.

The Dreamcast was Sega’s last console, released ahead of the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube, and featuring advanced graphics and online play. The console ended up being the company’s swan song in the hardware industry after a spectacular run with the Sega Genesis, and Sega has since shifted to just producing games for other hardware companies like Nintendo. But there are still vibrant communities that adore the Dreamcast, and many games were so popular that Sega began porting them to the Xbox Live Arcade. That means gamers can download popular Sega Dreamcast cames like Sonic Adventure and play them on the Xbox 360.

LulzSec said it was mostly doing the hacks for fun and was enjoying unleashing havoc on the Internet. It’s similar to Anonymous, when the group didn’t take on significant political and moral causes like the hacktivist group does today. The group also said that there was a lot of information taken from the networks it had broken into that the group had not publicly released. It has released gobs of sensitive data and passwords taken from users of various sites like CIA.gov.

“This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction. There are peons and lulz lizards; trolls and victims,” the group said in an official announcement.

While the group hasn’t been shy about taunting 4chan.org and Anonymous users, it quickly backpedaled and said that it was not planning on attacking anonymous. The two groups began sparring when LulzSec initiated a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of online-centric games offline. EVE Online, League of Legends, and Minecraft all faced outages or significant latency problems. That was enough to get the attention of “/v/,” an internal image sharing board on 4chan.org that focuses on video games.

“To confirm, we aren’t going after Anonymous. 4chan isn’t Anonymous to begin with, and /b/ is certainly not the whole of 4chan. True story,” LulzSec said in its main Twitter account. “Saying we’re attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we’re going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger.”

The group said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become what the public currently acknowledges as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed.

Lulzsec previously broke into the Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.” It also said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. Members of the LulzSec group were able to break into the PBS site several days ago and post a fake story saying that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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LulzSec has begun publicly mocking 4chan.org, the image-sharing message board where Anonymous was reportedly born, on its main Twitter account, which it has used to generate publicity for its attacks. When VentureBeat tried to access 4chan.org, the site was either inaccessible or very slow. That could incite frustration from Anonymous, which has proven time and again that it is a force to be reckoned with.

“Just saw a thread on (4chan.org message board /b/) where they’re trying to hunt us: you /b/tards realize that we are everything you’ve ever tried to be?” Lulzsec said on its Twitter account.

The sparring began when LulzSec initiated a “DDoS Party,” which was a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of games offline. EVE Online, League of Legends and Minecraft all faced outages or significant latency problems. That was enough to get the attention of “/v/,” an internal image sharing board on 4chan.org that focuses on video games.

“That kind of already happened when Lulzsec DDoSed Mincraft and EVE Online,” one user said on Reddit. “(Video game image board /v/) went out in droves and DDoSed to death anything related to Lulzsec. It was like watching a glorious internet civil war take place. ‘We ride our chocobos to war and enter the fray’ was the rallying cry on /v/ today.”

LulzSec has been quick to state that it is not part of Anonymous. But the group basically said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become what the public currently acknowledges as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed. Anonymous members also use the term “lulz” to describe the amusement they get out of hacking websites and other networks.

“We are the concentrated success of 2005 /b/, being ‘hunted’ by the 2011 furry horde. Challenge accepted, losers,” LulzSec said on its Twitter account.

Lulzsec previously broke into Sony’s Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.” It also said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. It seems like LulzSec’s modus operandi involves breaking into insecure networks for the sake of exposing security flaws or in retaliation for political causes.

Members of the LulzSec group were able to break into the PBS site several days ago and post a fake story that said rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive. It was the third high-profile hacking attack on a private network in a little more than a month. The group was also able to break into the private network of Bethesda Softworks, the game developer behind several popular games like Brink and Fallout 3. LulzSec also opened up a phone line that lets individuals call in to request targets that LulzSec should consider attacking with either an intrusion or a DDoS attack.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Assange is being held on charges that he sexually assaulted two Swedish women. During the hearing, the chief magistrate, Howard Riddle, agreed that reporters could send tweets as long as they did so quietly and did not disturb the court. Bail has been set at 200,000 pounds.

Also, three hackers were arrested in the wake of the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on the web sites of companies that cut WikiLeaks loose in the face of official pressure. Authorities found the name of designer Alex Tapanaris embedded in a PDF press release that was purported to have come from the hacker group, Anonymous, that launched the cyber attacks. Tapanaris’s web site was taken down, and he has reportedly been arrested. Other hackers with ties to Anonymous were reportedly arrested in the Netherlands. Their identities may have been given away by the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) software, which was used to carry out the attacks and had user information with it.

Two teens have been arrested for sure, including a 16-year-old from The Hague who was allegedly involved in Operation Payback, which was the name of the revenge campaign to get back at WikiLeaks’ former partners such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal. The second Dutch teen arrested was Martijn Gonlag of Hoogezand-Sappemeer. The timeline for the attacks has been kept at the PandaLabs blog. WikiLeaks got hit with cyber attacks first and then Anonymous announced retaliation. Given the nature of the arrests, it’s not clear if we’re in the midst of a full-blown cyber war or if the attacks are the work of a small group.

Lastly, the U.S. Air Force blocked access to the New York Times to prevent personnel from reading the WikiLeaks cables that the New York Times is publishing. It’s also blocking publications such as the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais, and Der Spiegel on Air Force computers. Of course, this is a losing game, as there are a lot of other sites that are running copies of WikiLeaks content. Wired rightly said this was like trying to put toothpaste back into a tube.

[photo credit: Wired]