IFPI website hacked to protest Pirate Bay trial

The Swedish website for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry was defaced Thursday by hackers protesting the group's involvement in the ongoing Pirate Bay trial in Stockholm.


The message on the homepage of the recording industry association's website urged Pirate Bay prosecutor Haakan Roswall of Stockholm to "stop lying." The hackers, calling themselves "The New Generation," said the intrusion was a "declaration of war against the anti-piracy industry."

The site was restored by early Thursday.

"It is deplorable that these saboteurs will go to such extremes as to infringe on our and others' freedom of speech on the internet," said Lars Gustafsson, a director of the IFPI in Sweden, which is trying to shutter Pirate Bay, the notorious BitTorrent tracker with more than 22 million users.

Peter Sunde, who is one of the four on trial, condemned the attack.

"Whomever is hacking the IFPI websites, please stop doing that," he wrote on Twitter. "It only makes us look bad!"

It's not the first time the IFPI has been swashbuckled. In 2007, the Pirate Bay briefly acquired control of the IFPI's international website site via a cybersquatter.