Last week, the Portuguese Ministry of Culture decided to shut down or block 28 file-sharing sites. The original complaint came from local anti-piracy outfit MAPiNET. In what appears to be a revenge attack, hackers targeted their website and diverted it to some of the world's biggest torrent sites.

In response to a complaint from local anti-piracy outfit MAPiNET, the Portuguese Ministry of Culture ordered a shutdown and blockade of 28 sites that allegedly link to copyrighted material hosted elsewhere.

As we reported earlier on our sideblog FreakBits, the Portuguese Cultural Activities Inspection ordered one of the most prominent ISPs to remove or block subscriber access to 28 ‘pirate websites’.

The complaint originated from the local anti-piracy outfit MAPiNET and today, as is often the case, they are the subject of reprisals by hackers.

Several hours ago hackers took control of the MAPiNET website and added code to redirect visitors to several of the word’s biggest torrent sites. At the time of writing the site is unavailable and showing “Offline. Regressa brevemente.” (Offline. Back soon)

However, there is still a way to test the hack for yourself. By doing a search on Google for ‘MAPiNET Pirate Bay‘ and clicking any MAPiNET link that goes within the site and not the homepage, hey presto. A cycling of diversions to The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and Demonoid, quite the opposite of what the anti-piracy outfit tried to accomplish.

Update: The site is now back online and the Google route no longer works.