The Recording Industry Association of America's web site was defaced earlier in the week and has experienced outages.

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The RIAA site was altered to include pro-file-sharing statements such as "Piracy can be beneficial to the music industry." A link to a mirrored hack can be found here.

Another mirrored hack features an apology from the RIAA for forcing the Chinese music site Listen4Ever to close down, as well offering MP3s and a link to Kazaa Lite.

The RIAA website is unavailable at the time of this report, hinting at a possible denial of service attack is being carried out against it.

It is not known who is behind the attack.

Motive might be an easier question to answer. The RIAA is supporting a bill being considered in US Congress that would give copyright holders and intellectual property owners the power to engage in acts such as spoofing and hacking.

So it would seem hackers have decided to take action.

Richard Menta, of MP3NewsWire, makes a couple of very good points about what we can expect in the future.

"The RIAA has proved time and time again that its technical initiatives - whether it is the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) or the designs of its Napster styled services PressPlay and MusicNet - are ill-conceived affairs when placed against the technical skills of the average garage coder," he says.

"Now they want to go against the world's script kiddies, individuals who continually develop the latest intrusion techniques that give network managers frequent headaches. Rosen is once again prying open Pandora's Box and the result will be damaging far beyond the scope of copyright should that bill ever pass."

Mirrors of hacked page:
http://www.scriobh.com/riaa/
http://www.digichapman.com/riaa-hacked.jpg

Some cynics claim the RIAA might've done the hack themselves (and other rants).

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