Virgin Media site goes titsup in Pirate Bay payback attack
Anonymous claims takedown victory
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Virgin Media's main website dropped off the interwebs on Tuesday with hackivist collective Anonymous claiming responsibility for the DDoS attacks in response to the company's recent cut-off of The Pirate Bay.
The telco said it had to down its "customer-facing" website for about an hour last night, after it was hit by Distributed Denial of Service attacks yesterday evening.
At the time of writing the site remains offline – although VM is claiming that it is "back online" as of this morning, following "intermittent" problems overnight.
Still out of action this morning
Virgin Media gave The Register this statement:
Our website, virginmedia.com, has been the subject of denial of service attacks so we took the site offline for a short period of time. We're aware some groups are claiming the attacks are a result of the recent High Court order which requires ISPs to prevent access to The Pirate Bay.
As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders but we strongly believe that tackling the issue of copyright infringement needs compelling legal alternatives, giving consumers access to great content at the right price, to help change consumer behaviour.
It's understood that rival ISP TalkTalk, which already offers web-filtering to its punters and was ordered by a High Court judge last week to shut off access to The Pirate Bay website, has also been targeted by hackers.
TalkTalk hadn't immediately returned our request for comment at time of writing.
An Anonymous representative claimed on the group's Twitter feed that the hacktivist group had attacked Virgin Media to protest against the company's "censorship" of The Pirate Bay. ®
COMMENTS
dammed if you do
not always a fan of VM but there wasn't much else they could do. They took it to court and lost.
Perhaps annon should be taking on the media industry rather than third parties.
Well Well
Oooo look the big bad VM have censored the web by blocking access to a site, I know what we should do, a DDOS attack.
There look what we just did.......censored the web by blocking access to a site.......
But we are not bad just defending your rights to a free web.
Thanks for that but I wanted to check my bill online and you have removed my freedom to do so......Tossers......
I don't like Virgin Media, at all. I don't agree with the blocking of the Pirate Bay either. However, I accept that VM have to comply with the court order and, on this occasion, I do not think they are at fault.
If anyone wants to protest the blocking of TPB, then I believe the more effective route would be some kind of legitimate action like writing to MPs to let them know we don't agree with censorship of this kind. If enough people did that, we *might* be able to nip the problem in the bud, and I hope we can because I find the ideas of judges and MPs that don't understand the internet calling for this kind of measure, and censorship of the internet in general, very alarming.
This does not send the right message to the right people.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
