Last night, Imperva sent over an email stating that it would monitor the Anonymous attacks and touch base again with some stats. The info now arrives in a blog which states that Anonymous used the Low Orbit Ion Canon (LOIC) application to DDoS websites owned by the FBI, MPAA, Department of Justice, the RIAA and more.
For those unfamiliar with LOIC, here is the application's definition, supplied by Wikipedia: "Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is an open source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application, written in C#. LOIC was initially developed by Praetox Technologies, but was later released into the public domain. LOIC is named after a fictitious weapon from the Command & Conquer series of video games."
"Not surprisingly, the tool they are using is exactly the same one used for Operation Payback which took place about a year ago," the security firm reports. "Operation Payback also used other DDoS tools and we’re not sure if those have been deployed, but it doesn’t seem they have."
Imperva looked at the LOIC downloads that have taken place thus far and discovered a HUGE spike in the past few days which coincides with the latest Anonymous campaign. As of 8:30AM PST on Friday, the largest number of downloaders actually reside within the United States, hovering at 17-percent. France is the second largest, followed by Brazil, Germany, Spain and the UK. 91-percent of these downloaders use a Windows-based OS to do so.
As reported Thursday night (and essentially watched it unfold), Anonymous attacked the websites of ten entities related to the SOPA and PIPA legislation, and the recent takedown on file-sharing website Megaupload. As Imperva reveals in the charts, Anonymous was relatively dormant until the news of the FBI's arrest went public. After that, all hell broke loose.
"Popular file-sharing website megaupload.com gets shutdown by U.S Justice - FBI and charged its founder with violating piracy laws," writes Anonymous in its typical Pastebin public statement. "Four Megaupload members were also arrested. We Anonymous are launching our largest attack ever on government and music industry sites. Lulz. The FBI didn't think they would get away with this did they? They should have expected us."
Along with the statement, Anonymous also released the personal information of MPAA CEO Chris Dodd, his wife, and his two children. They also provided the information for the MPAA and its ten offices spread out across the globe.
As of this writing, Anonymous is still in attack mode, its latest victim the anti-piracy.be website just an hour ago, and shop.mgm.com just two hours ago. They also seem to be performing continuous attacks against their previous targets as back-up servers bring the sites online again and again.
In related news, Gizmodo and TorrentFreak have awesome write-ups on why Megaupload was taken down. In a nutshell, they were sloppy and openly expressed their disregard to copyright holders.