WASHINGTON: US authorities on Tuesday arrested 14 people on charges they participated in major cyber attacks, including an attempt to cripple eBay's PayPal website as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks as a client.
FBI agents arrested 14 people in nine states and Washington, D.C., for the PayPal attack, which occurred last December and was allegedly coordinated by the hacking group Anonymous. It was the biggest response by authorities tied to a recent spate of high-profile cyber attacks.
Financial institutions like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard withdrew services from WikiLeaks last year after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret U.S. diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and numerous allies.
Hackers responded with so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks that flooded the companies' websites with requests for information and rendered them unavailable to legitimate users, according to the indictment filed in federal court in San Jose, California.
PayPal suffered attacks for several days last December. Company spokesman Anuj Nayar
said he could not comment on current legal action.
The 14 individuals were charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison if convicted, and intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The accused ranged in age from 20 to 42 and lived in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.
One of the difficulties authorities have had tracking down hacking attacks is that they can be launched from anywhere and can come from an individual who can mask his location.
Law enforcement authorities believe Anonymous is mostly made up of hackers believed to be in their teens and early 20s. The group has taken credit for numerous attacks, including attacks on Bank of America, Sony and the Malaysian government.
"The fact that they have been tracked back and that some of them have been arrested is
a significant development," said Mark Rasch, a former chief of the Justice Department's cyber crimes unit and now director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Consulting for the government technology services firm CSC.
In a likely sign investigations are intensifying, U.S. authorities executed more than 35 search warrants around the country in their investigation of coordinated cyber attacks against major
companies and organizations, the Justice Department said.
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