The website of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the world’s most popular martial arts organisation, has been hacked and visitors redirected to the hacker group’s site at Ugnazi.com.
The motives behind the attack are unconfirmed (now confirmed, see update below) but likely to be due to the UFC’s unwavering support of SOPA, a bill introduced to fight online trafficking of copyrighted content.
The UFC is notoriously ambitious with its attempts at pursuing sites who post streams to its live events; taking popular online streaming sites such as Justin.tv to court.
The UFC has always made clear it strongly supported the hotly debated SOPA bill. Most recently, a piece written by Lawrence Epstein, Executive Vice-President and General Counsel for Zuffa (the UFC’s parent company), once again defended his company’s position.
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Dana White, the UFC’s current President and the face of the company, gave this response to the hacking on Twitter.
The image below is what US visitors of the UFC’s website will have seen at time of writing.
Update:
An email from the hacking group, also on Twitter, confirms the motivations behind the hacking:
“They happened to be vulnerable and we were lead to believe they are for SOPA.”
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