Anonymous briefly deletes CBS.com from the Internet

In a rampage following the U.S. government's takedown of file-sharing site MegaUpload, the hacktivist group Anonymous not only knocked the CBS.com website offline on Sunday, but deleted all its files.

As described by Gizmodo, "The CBS takedown wasn't your regular DDoS attack because if you went to CBS.com at the time Anon attacked it, there was nothing except an index page with a single file. That's it. Basically, Anonymous gained access to CBS.com and deleted EVERYTHING."

This followed a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, during which Anonymous took credit for bringing down the websites of the Department of Justice, Universal Music, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Motion Picture Association of America.

The CBS site was soon restoried, but other targets on Sunday included Universal Music (for a second time), the French media company Vivendi, and a number of Brazilian sites.

Meanwhile, sites in European nations were being attacked by Anonymous over their support for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a treaty widely described as similar to but potentially worse than the Stop Online Piracy Act, which provoked a dramatic protest blackout earlier this week. The websites of Poland's parliament and prime minister were among those affected, and the Anonymous Facebook page on Sunday also featured defacements of sites in Romania.