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BMI website targeted by DDoS attack
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 10 March 2011
US collecting society BMI is the latest organisation to have its website hit by those Operation Payback dudes who get their kicks by over-running the servers of pro-copyright organisations. Well, it takes all sorts, I suppose.
According to TG Daily, the Anonymous group which instigates the so called Distributed Denial Of Service attacks against pro-copyright groups issued a statement saying: “We have seen BMI consistently legislate copyright and consequently have decided to take action to show the people will not stand for its crimes against the public. As of the time of the writing of this letter, BMI has been taken down by our successful attack”.
It continued: “This is a message to you and other corporations like you: We will not stand this abuse anymore. No company shall take advantage of our government to churn out profits and censor information in any form. This is unacceptable and will be dealt with accordingly by Anonymous. We are not pirates, we are not hackers in our mother’s basement. We are Anonymous. We do not forgive, we do not forget, you should have expected us”.
It is probably true that copyright rules do need reforming, and it is certainly true big copyright owners did react in a dumb way when the internet first arrived on the scene, but assuming this statement is really from a key player in the albeit informal Anonymous community, they do come across as a bunch of self-important tossers, don’t they? And more to the point, they hardly help the cause of those lobbying for copyright reform through more legitimate channels.
Anyway, the not-for-profit BMI issued its own statement yesterday saying: “In a protective measure, BMI.com has been temporarily taken down due to a denial of service attack reportedly launched by a hacker group. The attack slows down external access to BMI.com. There has not been a breach of security into our systems in any form and access has not been obtained to any secure content”.
It added: “We believe that this attack is part of their misguided campaign to attack creative rights. Other than the website, operations are not impacted by the company’s protective move. BMI plans to resume full service of all online services for its songwriters, music publishers and licensees shortly”.
