Online “hacktivist” group Anonymous put its sights on the Ukrainian government today, shutting down the websites for a number of government agencies including the Ukrainian Anti-Piracy Association, the Ukrainian Agency for Copyright and Related Rights and The National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine. The move comes days after the Ukrainian government shut down popular bittorent tracker site Demonoid. The group posted a statement on its PR blog condemning the move, and accusing the Ukrainian government of caving in to U.S. anti-piracy pressure.
“Despite Demonoid blocking all Ukrainian IP addresses to avoid upsetting local law, the site still attracted the attention of the authorities. The raid on Demonoid was timed to coincide with the first trip of Deputy Prime Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky’s to the United States on the agenda: copyright infringement,” the group said in the post. “This implies that the attack against Demonoid was a preplanned operation, and a deliberate and malicious attack against Internet Freedom.”
Anonymous also targeted the Ukraine in June, to protest the slaughtering of stray dogs before the country hosted a Euro 2012 soccer match. The current protest called “OpDemonoid,” was explained in detail in a video released on YouTube. The tactics were in keeping with previous Anonymous protests, using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) to disable a website.
