Members of the notorious 4chan image board have launched a coordinated a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against mpaa.org, the website of the Motion Picture Association of America.

The attack began at 9:00 PM EST and is still ongoing. It only took eight minutes for the MPAA website to go down.

According to an announcement posted on the Internet, 4chan members consider this a retaliation against film studios who paid an Indian company called Aiplex Software to attack torrent websites in a similar manner.

Last week, Aiplex's managing director boasted in the media that when websites refuse to respond to DMCA takedown notices sent by his company, on behalf of local and international film studios, his team resorts to DDoS.

"[…] We flood the website with lakhs [hundred of thousands] of requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity," he said.

Aiplex was the original target in 4chan's attack plans, but it was replaced with MPAA at the last moment, because the Indian company's website was hit and taken down ahead of schedule by someone else.

"Rejoice, /b/rothers, even if it was at the hands of a single anon that it was done, even if ahead of schedule. Now we have our lasers primed, but what do we target now?

"We target the bastard group that has thus far led this charge against our websites, like The Pirate Bay. We target MPAA.ORG!" the 4chan announcement said.

Instructions regarding what programs to use in the attack, where to get them from and what IP address to target were also included.

4chan is a popular image board that served as birthplace for numerous Internet memes. Its members have repeatedly proven that they can band together to harass organizations or individuals in numerous ways.