4Chan takes down MPAA website with DDoS attack

4Chan, the popular image board which has been in the news of late for tracking down the "Cat Bin Lady" and for trying to track down the "YouTube Puppy Throwing Girl," has used a DDoS (Distrubed Denial-of-Service) attack to take down the website of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as well as the website of Aiplex Software. Aiplex has been carrying out its own DDoS attacks been DDoSing against popular BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay, recently.

According to Wikipedia, citing a TorrentFreak report, AiPlex has openly admitted to executing such DDoS attacks.

According to security firm Panda Labs, the attack began at 9:00 PM ET on Friday night and took only 8 minutes to bring the entire site crashing down. As of the time of this writing on Saturday morning, the MPAA site is still down.

Here's the message that was sent at 9PM by 4Chan, to organize the effort:

How fast you are in such a short time! Aiplex, the b*stard hired gun that DDoS’d TPB (The Pirate Bay), is already down! Rejoice, /b/rothers, even if it was at the hands of a single anon that it was done, even if ahead of schedule. now we have our lasers primed, but what do we target now?

We target the b*stard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG! The IP is designated at “216.20.162.10″, and our firing time remains THE SAME. All details are just as before, but we have reaimed our crosshairs on this much larger target. We have the manpower, we have the botnets, it’s time we do to them what they keep doing to us.

REPEAT: AIPLEX IS ALREADY DOWN THANKS TO A SINGLE ANON. WE ARE MIGRATING TARGETS.

To do this, all the followers had to do, according to the full message, is load up their LOICs (Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a DDoS tool that is open source), and enter the IP address. It's so easy to do, how do you stop the power of an entire Internet community, as Panda said.

Aside from attacks like this (which previously targeted the church of Scientology), 4Chan is responsible for some Internet memes such as Rickroll and lolcats. It’s unclear at this point how long the DDoS attacks on the two sites will continue.