India Internet News
FBI Caught Anonymous Hackers Responsible For Cyber-attacks On PayPal
20 July 2011
On Tuesday, according to the Department of Justice, FBI agents have arrested 16 people assuming they belong to the well-known Anonymous hacker group.
The operation was spread over 9 states and concentrated on 14 people who were expected to be involved in a cyber attack on PayPal in December, in evident revenge for the site’s dismissal of a donation account for Wikileaks after the announcement of thousands of confidential US State Department cables. Two other suspects in other cyber-related crimes were also arrested.
In an accusation unsealed Tuesday in the federal court in San Jose, California, the suspected Anonymous members were charged with numerous conspiracy and deliberate damage to a protected computer. The sweep took place just after Anonymous and its ally LulzSec hacked the British newspaper website the Sun and promised to release a trove of emails from its owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The group has been connected with innumerable denial-of-service attacks, that prevent websites from usual operations by bombarding them with requests from networks of hijacked computers.
Their latest victims include Monsanto, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the City of Orlando, Sony, Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, and government websites in Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia. Even suspected Anonymous members were arrested in Britain and Holland.