The United States Department of Homeland Security had shut down a total of 82 sites on the Internet on Cyber Monday’s post-Thanksgiving online shopping day. Those sites, which include a BitTorrent meta-search engine and e-commerce sites selling illegal materials, such as illegal copyrighted works, and counterfeits, such as DVDs, software, and CDs, were sent seizure orders as part of an Operation in Our Sites v. 2.0 project and continues a decade-long crackdown by the government on the sales of illegal and counterfeit materials on the Web. The government warns online shoppers looking for bargains for the holiday season to exercise caution and that if a deal is too good to be true, it probably is. Although the government did not release the names or domains of the sites that it had shut down, a purported list was published by TorrentFreak blog, and that other sources are reporting that many of the sites that were shut down are up and operating again now under different domain names, showing the difficulty in policing the Internet.
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