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U.S. arrests 14 suspects related to "Anonymous" hacker group

20 July 2011 03:54 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday said the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has arrested 14 suspects on charges related to their alleged involvement in a cyber attack on PayPal’s website as part of an action claimed by the hacker group "Anonymous.", APA reports siting Xinhua.
The 14 individuals were arrested in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio on charges contained in an indictment unsealed Tuesday in the Northern District of California in San Jose.
According to the indictment, in late November 2010, WikiLeaks released a large amount of classified U.S. State Department cables on its website. Citing violations of the PayPal terms of service, and in response to WikiLeaks’ release of the classified cables, PayPal suspended WikiLeaks’ accounts so that WikiLeaks could no longer receive donations via PayPal. In retribution for PayPal’s termination of the account, a group calling itself "Anonymous" coordinated and executed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal’s computer servers using an open source computer program the group makes available for free download on the Internet.
DDoS attacks are attempts to render computers unavailable to users through a variety of means, including saturating the target computers or networks with external communications requests, thereby denying service to legitimate users.
The defendants are charged with various counts of conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer. The charge of intentional damage to a protected computer carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a 250,000-dollar fine. Each count of conspiracy carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a 250,000-dollar fine.