Earlier this week, UK anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law had their website taken down by a DDoS attack. Adding insult to injury, owner Andrew Crossley was harassed at home in the middle of the night by prank phone calls. Now, through a fault with his website, hundreds of megabytes of private emails have been exposed to the public and uploaded to The Pirate Bay. To those hoping that this is a MediaDefender-type fiasco all over again, trust us - it is.

"Their site came back online [after the DDoS attack] - and on their frontpage was accidentally a backup file of the whole website (default directory listing, their site was empty), including emails and passwords," a leader of the attacking group told TorrentFreak. "The email contains billing passwords and some information that ACS:Law is having financial problems."

Financial problems? Interesting. Many tens of thousands of people who received letters from ACS:Law are also experiencing the same problem, having already paid up several hundred pounds each to make non-existent lawsuits go away.

"We're still sorting through it. There's a lot of stuff here to go through. But, basically, we were told we were less important than a 10 minute late train, or a queue for coffee by Andrew," the attackers' spokesman told us, adding: "Payback is a b.itch, isn't it Andrew?"

A little taster from emails read so far:

- ACS:Law and USCG (of Hurt Locker fame) appear to be cooperating
- Crossley boasts that his retained lawyer "literally wrote the SRA rules!"
- Crossley accuses Which? of 'defamation' and articles designed to "demean" and "denigrate"
- Crossley gives veiled warnings to Which? that he could sue them for libel
- Internal documents reveal intentions to take down Slyck.com

There are also a series of highly abusive emails from Crossley to his ex-wife, where in part he tells her to "F.uck off and keep out of my life" and accuses her of being with a "drug addled hermit".