European Parliament says its website taken offline by Anonymous

The European Parliament's website fell under a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDOS) on Thursday in what the organization classified as retaliation for the shutdown of the Megaupload file-sharing site and an anti-counterfeiting trade agreement.

The Parliament issued a statement saying it had acted to reduce the impact of the attacks, but the site was still down as of mid-afternoon Thursday.

Anonymous, a loose-knit group of hackers and digital activists, has undertaken a series of DDOS attacks against government websites and other organizations following last week's international take-down of Megaupload, whose operators are wanted by U.S. authorities for alleged copyright infringement related offenses.