Megaupload shutdown reveals cloud risk.

• Position: CLOUD COMPUTING - Brief article

When the U.S. government shuttered popular file-sharing service Megaupload earlier this year for violating copyright laws, users cried censorship, and the hacker group Anonymous retaliated by taking down the Department of Justice's (DOJ) website.

The DOJ executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and in eight countries to seize servers and domains belonging to Megaupload, according to the 72-page federal indictment unsealed on January 19. Megaupload's CEO, Kim Dotcom, and other officials were arrested in a raid in New Zealand, according to Wired. The DOJ is seeking to extradite Dotcom to the United States to face criminal conspiracy charges.

Megaupload is an online "locker" service in which users can anonymously upload large files to the company servers and share the content via a unique URL. Before it was shut down, it was the most popular web-based file-sharing service by far, according to Wired. In a recent study of 1,600 networks, Palo Alto Networks found it accounted for about a quarter of all file-sharing traffic, about 10% more than its nearest competitor.

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