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U.S. arrests 16 in probe of Anonymous hackers

U.S. authorities Tuesday arrested 16 people on charges they were involved in major cyber attacks including attacks on eBay's PayPal website as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks' donation account.
/ Source: msnbc.com news services

U.S. authorities Tuesday arrested 16 people on charges they were involved in major cyber attacks including attacks on eBay's PayPal website as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks' donation account.

The FBI arrests were made as part of a wide-ranging investigation of the Internet vigilante hacking group Anonymous, both the FBI and Department of Justice said, and followed claims by the group that it broke into Apple servers and launched attacks last year that shut down sites of MasterCard and Visa.

Fourteen arrests were made in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio, according to a press release from the Department of Justice. The FBI executed more than 35 search warrants.

An indictment charging those arrested was unsealed Tuesday in the Northern District of California in San Jose.

In addition, two individuals were arrested on similar charges in two separate complaints filed in the Middle District of Florida and the District of New Jersey.

Arrests were also made by the UK's Metropolitan Police Service and the Dutch National Police Agency in connection with alleged cyber-related crimes.

The federal indictment alleges that "in retribution for PayPal’s termination of WikiLeaks’ donation 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," the Department of Justice said in its press release.

"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 charged in the federal indictment allegedly conspired with others to intentionally damage protected computers at PayPal from Dec. 6, 2010, to Dec. 10, 2010.

The arrests followed raids earlier in the day on six locations in New York, including one in Brooklyn and five others on Long Island, where homes were searched for computers and computer-related accessories, the FBI said.

The equipment was suspected of being used by members of Anonymous, a grass-roots organization inspired by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange.

Anonymous, which law enforcement authorities believe is mostly made up of hackers believed to be in their teens and early 20s, also has released scores of private e-mails and other data from an Arizona police website. Those named in the indictment Tuesday ranged in age from 20 to 42.

The DOJ noted that "one individual’s name has been withheld by the court," possibly because he or she is a minor.

The 20-year-old, Mercedes Renee Haefer, is a university student, and her lawyer, Stanley L. Cohen of New York, compared the case to the federal prosecution of former U.S. defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg following his release in 1971 to The New York Times and other newspapers a Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War. The government said Haefer is also known as "No" and "MMMM."

"In the 18th century, people stood on street corners handing out pamphlets saying, 'Beware the all-powerful military and big government,'" Cohen told The Associated Press. "Some people listened. Some people walked away. Today, pamphleteers use the Internet."

Cohen compared the acts allegedly committed by his client and the others to civil disobedience. "The people being arrested are not being accused of acts of violence," Cohen said.

Anonymous teamed up with the Lulz Security group of hackers in June, although it is believed LulzSec members were already affiliated with Anonymous. LulzSec has breached websites of Sony, the CIA and a British police unit, and on Monday took credit for defacing Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper website.

Experts say the FBI raids should have been expected as the group's actions have become more daring, including two hacks that were revealed by Anonymous last week, one at Monsanto and another at military consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

"I don't think anybody should be surprised," said Josh Shaul, chief technical officer of Application Security, Inc., which helps companies protect their data. "They played with fire and they got burned."

The Department of Justice said that so far, "more than 75 searches have taken place in the United States as part of the ongoing investigations into these attacks."