DDOS Attacks Continue: Anonymous Schedules CISPA Attacks for April 20

As I reported yesterday, Anonymous Goes on Worldwide DDOS Spree, Anonymous and its many subgroups are hitting government and big commercial sites worldwide with denial of service attacks (DOS). And it’s ongoing.

Multiple attacks began as early as Monday of this week. A majority of the attacks do appear to be nothing more than “botnet” type distributed denial of service attacks (DDOS), though some target lists I located indicate plans for more serious damage.

The first series of attacks yesterday were organized by the loosely-knit hacker community known as Anonymous, which made a call to arms for its legions to hit sites — particularly those who are, it said, “anti-piracy advocates” in the Netherlands. DDOS attacks began as instructed — at 20:00 GMT yesterday.

Screen Capture of "Operation Against Anti-Piracy" Target List

As part of its so-called Operation Against Anti-Piracy, Twitter was filled with remarks around “tangodown,” slang for successful DDOS attacks. Typically, to confirm or track their attacks, Anonymous members and supporters will take screen captures of failed website requests and include them in tweets.

DDOS attacks don’t require much skill, but they amount to great annoyance, downtime and even lost revenue as a result of site downtime.

Screen Capture of "Operation Against Anti-Piracy" #tangodown Confirmation Tweets

The Netherlands weren’t alone. As reported, an up-and-coming Anonymous-like — but not Anonymous affiliated — group called Al Qaeda Sec targeted DC.gov and NYC.gov for attacks. Starting early in the day, Al Qaeda Sec focused efforts on both city websites on and off throughout the day. NYC.gov was only offline for a few hours in the morning and in the evening, DC.gov suffered longer outages for most of the evening and night last night. Al Qaeda Sec has since moved on to also targeting the primary website of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and the Salt Lake City Police Department.

As of this writing, Twitter continues to report ongoing attacks against the Mossad site at the request of Al Qaeda Sec. Of specific note, many suspected Anonymous related Twitter accounts are supporting the actions of Al Qaeda Sec, but are distancing themselves from a direct relationship with the new group.

Also this week, Anonymous directed DDOS attacks against the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the US Department of Justice (DOJ), and the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) websites. According to the Anonymous Operations Twitter feed these attacks will continue against other, related US and European Union (EU) related government websites throughout the rest of the week.

In fact, Anonymous Operations is calling for a scheduled “Twitter Bomb” for tomorrow, Friday April 20, 2012, to target CISPA related accounts.