Sony’s homepage to be plastered with pirated music in protest of SOPA.
Protect yourselves now before its too late! STOP #SOPA & #PIPA http://americancensorship.org/ Stop American Censorship
Coordinated teams of hacktivists will wage war on Sony on Monday to punish the company for supporting the controversial US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
The Anonymous collective plans to hack Sony.com and load the homepage with BitTorrent files that allow users to download copyright-protected music and movies — the very action SOPA is designed to prevent.
Hackers also plan to strike Sony Music’s online store, reducing the cost of songs to zero.
Instructions in an Anonymous chatroom
If it is successful, personal details of company executives will also be plastered on the defaced homepage, in an act known as doxing.
Anonymous calls the defaced page ‘the payload’ to which visitors to Sony websites all over the world will be redirected.
The ‘payload’ codename hints at the loose-knit collective’s plan to militarise.
The faceless organisers of Operation Sony (OpSony) have become sensitive about their public image: they don’t want to be referred to as unskilled hackers, or script kiddies, for launching denial of service attacks against Sony, or draw the ire of gamers by damaging the PlayStation Network as it did in Febuary.
Certain skilled hackers have been placed into elite, members-only teams, Eta, Theta and Zeta, which have been tasked with hacking into Sony’s online stores so the payload may be uploaded.
Team organising rooms
Eta will try to eliminate price tags on the Sony store. Zeta will seek a means to upload the payload and redirect visitors to Sony sites to it, and Theta will attempt to prevent Sony from rectifying the damage.
The remaining Alpha, Beta, Delta and Gamma teams have developed the payload and are open for anyone to participate.
Alpha is collating copyright-infringing torrents, Gamma works on doxing Sony executives and Delta is drafting a press release.
Team Beta is working on presentation of the data and a final group, Iota, aims to spread Anonymous propaganda including flyers, posters, and shitting on executives’ lawns’.
Anonymous insiders offered few further details about the plan, beyond that the OpSony campaign hinges on the hackers’ ability to crack Sony’s defences.
Team Delta’s draft press release was optimistic: Last April, we took down the Playstation Network. We are firmly rooted in your servers and we can, at will, take them down again.
While Anonymous says Sony’s support of SOPA has triggered the attack, it is merely the latest in a laundry-list of gripes Anonymous holds against the company.
The US Judiciary Committee lists MasterCard Worldwide, CBS, the International Association of Fire Fighters, Revlon and Pfizer among other supporters of the SOPA bill.
The draft payload SOURCE
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Twitter goes down within hours of Anonymous’ threat against it
Twitter is down again after briefly recovering from a significant outage which saw the Fail Whale return for millions of users for over an hour on Sunday.
The finger is already being pointed at Anonymous, who, according to This is Xbox, threatened The UN, Xbox Live, US Bank, Capital One, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will be struck down if Megaupload.com was not put back online within three days of January 19 (although @YourAnonNews tweeted that the group would not do so).
On Sunday Anonymous took down several Brazilian Government websites; Gizmodo is reporting that they also took down cbs.com and UniversalMusic.com. On Thursday they took down the US Department of Justices’s website and Universal Music’s as a reply to the shutting down of Megaupload.com.
We don’t know at this point if it was Anonymous that took Twitter down. Twitter’s API status page is reporting (if we’re reading this right) that there was a significant increase in the number of calls, more than doubling the processing time from 481ms to 970ms on Sunday (perhaps a DDOS attack?). MORE
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