ACS:Law are a bunch of ambulance chasing solicitors who specialise in asking people for money for alleged copyright infringement via P2P. The downloading in question often involves computer games or pornography.

The evidence for this is often nothing more than a single IP address. If you don't pay up they threaten to take you to court. In order to do this they request your name and address from your ISP, which is the only organisation that can tie your details to an IP address.

Due to these tactics, which some call extortion, ACS:Law are currently under investigation by the Solicitor's Regulatory Authority.

Members of 4Chan launched a denial of service attack on the ACS:Law website.

The guy running ACS:Law, Andrew Crossley, has twice been found of conduct unbefitting a solicitor. This is what he had to say about 4Chan's efforts :

It was only down for a few hours. I have far more concern over the fact of my train turning up 10 minutes late or having to queue for a coffee than them wasting my time with this sort of rubbish.

Oh dear. Never poke a bear in the face. Especially when it has already started chewing your legs off. It appears 4Chan re-doubled their efforts.

While Crossley's minions struggled to restore their site they appear to have exposed a huge amount of data to anyone who cared to look. There was no hacking involved as ACS:Law basically published the information for the World to see. Unfortunately for ACS:Law this data included personal details of their next batch of victims. This is a clear breach of the Data Protection Act. It also showed that BT were happily passing people's details to ACS:Law in unencrypted spreadsheets via email.

Given their IT incompetence it is impossible for anyone (including a court) to know if the data ACS:Law is presenting is correct, hasn't be manipulated or suffered any cut-n-paste errors.

So bascially huge numbers of internet users are pissing themselves laughing after ACS:Law has been sliced, diced, bent over and raped by 4Chan.

Here's hoping ACS:Law get that £500,000 fine they deserve.