BANGALORE, INDIA: The hacking group Anonymous has threatened  a new attack on SOPA and PIPA bills supporters on January 31, encouraging people to join the protest.

While supporting protests against these bills, ESET warns Internet users in India to think twice before getting involved in activities which look more like cyber-crime and less like activism.

Anonymous has posted a new message in its channel announcing a new attack on ESPN , a supporter of SOPA and PIPA, on January 31 at 12 am.

A day before, another video suggesting an attack on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter on January 28 was uploaded and made public. Later in a Twitter message, Anonymous denied that they planned any attack on Facebook. Earlier in 2011, another video was posted in YouTube which promised an attack on Facebook by Anonymous on November 5. But nothing happened that time either.

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The new protest goes in one row with recent attacks on the CBS.com, Warner Brothers, and FBI sites, claims the Anonymous video. Narrator solicits Internet users, who are against SOPA and PIPA, to participate in the next attack and gives link to the manual “How To Join ANONYMOUS”.

“While Anonymous targeting government agencies and large companies is not new, encouraging people to download programs, probably malicious, or to go to websites that will automatically begin a DDoS (Denial-of-service-attack) against the targeted organization, is a new way of Hacktivism”, says Pankaj Jain, Director, ESET India.

The promised attacks, in general, were brought on by SOPA or PIPA Acts which have been widely discussed in USA and globally. Moreover, the recent arrest of operators of file-sharing site Megaupload who had been indicted for operating a criminal enterprise that generated over $175 million by trafficking in over half a billion dollars of pirated copyrighted material, was an incitement to Anonymous to announce a new protest.

Opponents of the bill, including ESET, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla Corporation and Wikipedia, express that the target of SOPA is wrong. They feel filtering Internet, requiring service providers and search engines to change and delete domain names, will not help fighting piracy and cybercrime, but will  lead to censorship issues and breaking the logic of the Internet will inevitably affect businesses, US and world’s economy as a whole.