Anonymous go after Riaa.com...again

Internet hacktivist Anonymous organised an attack, codenamed Operation Payback, against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) website, following its request for $75 trillion (USD) in damages from peer-to-peer site LimeWire. The DDoS was scheduled for Friday 25 March, at 7pm EST.

I know: $75 trillion. That is *not* a typo. To give this context, if you were paid $10,000/second, it would still take you about 1000 years to make that amount of cash.

According to ComputerWorld, RIAA have requested LimeWire pay a whopping $150,000 for each download of the 11,000 songs listed in the lawsuit, which was brought forward by RIAA and 12 other recording industry peers.

Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected RIAA's request as "absurd", according to The Examiner. She rightly pointed out that this was more money than the industry had made in its entire history.

Anonymous seemed to agree with the judge, and the Anonymous volunteer cyber army was called in to join forces for a coordinated attack against RIAA.

The attack is reported to have lasted about five hours, during which time RIAA.com was down.

In October last year, Judge Wood ordered LimeWire to terminate its peer-to-peer file sharing service, and deemed LimeWire liable for copyright infringement.

This is not the first time that Anonymous hit RIAA. The two main RIAA websites were hit in October last year, also in response to the company's attack on Limewire, reported the Register.

Anonymous are tied to attacks on Westboro Baptist Church, HBGary, official websites in Egypt, Visa and Paypal.

Read more about Anonymous in Naked Security's Flaming Retort