The United States Department of Justice appears to be under attack for the second time since the popular Megaupload file sharing site was taken down. The group Anonymous appears to be carrying out this latest attack in protest against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

In its Mega Song music video, which was released last month, Megaupload claimed the site had 1 billion users and accounted for 4% of all traffic on the internet. www.megaupload.com was the 77th busiest site according to the Netcraft Toolbar. The company's main website was hosted by Carpathia Hosting, but now displays an FBI anti-piracy warning hosted by Amazon. The warning explains, "This domain name associated with the website Megaupload.com has been seized pursuant to an order issued by a U.S. District Court." Despite the static nature of the warning page, it appears to have struggled with the amount of traffic it was receiving over the weekend:

Plans by Anonymous to launch a distributed denial of service attack against www.governo.it were changed half an hour before the attack was scheduled to commence. The group used IRC, Twitter, Pastebin and image sharing sites to advertise the attack a day before it was due to start, but the surprise change meant that www.italia.gov.it unexpectedly ended up bearing the brunt of the attack.

The DDoS attack against www.italia.gov.it was immediately successful, with the site becoming inaccessible from 14:00 UTC on Thursday. The attack appeared to subside a few hours later and the site is now functioning normally with no apparent changes to its infrastructure.

After seeing how easily its "lulzcannon" were able to take down www.italia.gov.it, some members of Anonymous called for the original target, www.governo.it, to be attacked as well. It was not apparent how many people took part in this secondary attack, but it appeared to have a minimal impact on the site's availability:

Finnish anti-piracy organisation TTVK is still under attack after it successfully applied for one of the country's largest ISPs to block access to the popular bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay. The Helsinki District Court ordered Elisa Oyj to implement the block, and Elisa responded by appealing the decision to the Helsinki Court of Appeal.

In protest against the block, AnonFinland called for its supporters to "fire their cannons" at the TTVK's antipiracy.fi website, which quickly succumbed to the attack. Anonymous has issued similar calls to arms in the past – most notably towards the end of 2010, when WikiLeaks supporters successfully used the LOIC tool (Low Orbit Ion Cannon) to attack the websites of Visa, MasterCard and PayPal.

Shortly after calling for the site to be attacked, AnonFinland tweeted a now-customary "tango down" message, signifying that the attack had succeeded. With a Netcraft site rank of only 435586, it is likely that antipiracy.fi was typically not accustomed to large volumes of traffic. This, coupled with the fact that the site does not make use of a CDN to increase redundancy or reduce network latency, may have made the organisation an easy target.

antipiracy.fi – which is coincidentally hosted by Elisa Oyj – was still down at the time of publication.

The most reliable hosting company in December was Qube Managed Services, which responded to all but one of Netcraft's requests throughout the entire month. Qube offers managed hosting, cloud hosting and managed colocation for a range of customers, with a particular interest for those in the Finance and New Media sectors. The company was founded in London in 2001, where it now has two data centers. Customers can also make use of Qube's additional data centers in New York and Zurich.

Qube also performed well in the previous month, when it was the second most reliable hosting company.

Virtual Internet took second place, also with only one failed request, but with a longer connection time. The UK-based company provides a content distribution network (CDN) for the Monstermind game on Facebook, and also offers a range of private and public cloud hosting on both VMware and Xen hypervisors.

New York Internet was the third most reliable hosting company. NYI offers colocation, dedicated servers and virtual hosting from data centers in New York. The company focuses on reliability and technical support that is responsive round the clock.

Four of December's top ten most reliable hosting company sites used Linux, while three used FreeBSD, two used Windows Server 2008, and one used F5 BIG-IP.

Netcraft measures and makes available the response times of around forty leading hosting providers' sites. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period.

From a customer's point of view, the percentage of failed requests is more pertinent than outages on hosting companies' own sites, as this gives a pointer to reliability of routing, and this is why we choose to rank our table by fewest failed requests, rather than shortest periods of outage. In the event the number of failed requests are equal then sites are ranked by average connection times.

Information on the measurement process and current measurements is available.

Blogging site LiveJournal is still being hammered by a distributed denial of service attack which started 10 days ago.

On November 28, the LiveJournal Status website announced in both English and Russian that the site was under a DDoS attack.

The attack appears to have continued over the past 10 days, causing some significant outages and slowdowns. Nonetheless, LiveJournal did manage to stay online throughout most of this period, although the company had to disable support for third party services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google yesterday.

LiveJournal has been owned by Russian media company SUP since 2007, and there has been much speculation that this latest attack could be related to recent elections in Russia. LiveJournal was subjected to a series of similar attacks in March and April this year, which LiveJournal attempted to counter by upgrading their servers.

At 13:15 UTC today, LiveJournal again confirmed that the site was up, but still under a DDoS attack.