Teen accused of Anonymous and LulzSec attacks
A 16-year-old boy arrested in London yesterday under the Computer Misuse Act is suspected of involvement in cyber attacks by both the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups, it is understood.
He was arrested at an address in south London and remains in custody at a central London police station.
Scotland Yard’s specialist cyber crime unit acted in cooperation with the FBI, which arrested 16 people yesterday. Dutch police also made four arrests, the Department of Justice said.
All but two of the American suspects have been indicted for involvement in a Denial of Service attack on the PayPal website in early December, which was launched by Anonymous after the online payments firm suspended the account Wikileaks used to collect public donations.
The 14, including 11 men and two women aged between 20 and 42, were arrested in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio. The court withheld the identity of one individual.
Anonymous, a collective of so-called hacktivists, viewed the suspension as an assault on internet freedom and targeted PayPal as part of “Operation Avenge Assange”. Members used software called the Low Orbit Ion Cannon to bombard the website with traffic in an attempt to overwhelm its servers and force it offline.
The FBI arrests are the first in the United States since the international investigation of Anonymous was launched last year. The probe has since widened to cover LulzSec, a smaller and less overtly political group that splintered from Anonymous in April and embarked on a two-month spree of cyber attacks on organisations including the CIA and SOCA.
More than 60 people allegedly linked to either or both groups have now been arrested worldwide, including eight in Britain. Scotland Yard's Police Central e-Crime Unit previously arrested five in January, one in April and one in June.
As well as their 14 Anonymous arrests yesterday, US federal agents arrested a man for involvement LulzSec’s attack on a security website linked to the FBI. Scott Matthew Arciszewski, 21, is accused of hacking into the Tampa Bay InfraGard website on 21 June.
He allegedly uploaded three files, advertised the intrusion on Twitter and “directed visitors to a separate website containing links with instructions on how to exploit the Tampa InfraGard website”.
At the time LulzSec issued a statement claiming it perpetrated the breach to expose malpractice by elements of the security industry. It is understood that Scotland Yard will also be speaking to 16-year-old arrested in London about the attack on InfraGard.
At the end of June, after the arrest in Britain of another alleged member, LulzSec announced it would disband. The group reemerged this week however, to claim credit for hacking the website of The Sun newspaper and publishing a spoof story that claimed Rupert Murdoch was dead.
The final US suspect, 21-year-old Lance Moore, is accused of stealing confidential 4G mobile network plans from the telecoms giant AT&T and handing it to Anonymous.
.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8649621/Teen-accused-of-Anonymous-and-LulzSec-attacks.html
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