Phantom Maelstrom

In the fall of 2010, the hacktivist hacker collective group "Anonymous" started Operation Payback, the longest and most widespread attack on anti-piracy groups, lawyers and lobbyists in history.

Initially, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) assaults were started against the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and anti-piracy company AiPlex Software because these outfits had targeted The Pirate Bay.

Those DDoS attacks were later replicated against many other targets that have spoken out against piracy or for copyright, resulting in widespread media coverage.

Last week, the tag #OperationPayback is appearing once again in several places as "Anonymous" is once again targeting anti-piracy outfits who managed to strike against The Pirate Bay.

Earlier last week, the site of the Finnish CIAPC (Copyright Information and Anti-piracy Centre) went dark after they won a Pirate Bay blockade, and today the same happened to the Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland) who won a similar case.

The Pirate Bay, meanwhile, is encouraging users in the blocked countries to get prepared to use TOR (The Union Router) or a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

But they may not even have to...

In the Netherlands, the local Pirate Party already set up a proxy at tpb.piratenpartij.nl, and they are determined to provide Dutch users access to the torrent sites in the future.