In a nationwide sting operation, the FBI on Tuesday arrested 14 individuals for allegedly being involved in a November cyberattack on PayPal’s website, which the group Anonymous claimed credit for conducting, according to the Justice Department.
The individuals were arrested in nine states and the District of Columbia on charges contained in an indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. According to the indictment, they allegedly conspired with others to intentionally damage protected computers at PayPal from December 6, 2010, to December 10, 2010.
“The defendants are charged with various counts of conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer,” according to the Justice Department.
The individuals named in the indictment are: Christopher Wayne Cooper, 23; Joshua John Covelli, 26; Keith Wilson Downey, 26; Mercedes Renee Haefer, 20; Donald Husband, 29; Vincent Charles Kershaw, 27; Ethan Miles, 33; James C. Murphy, 36; Drew Alan Phillips, 26; Jeffrey Puglisi, 28; Tracy Ann Valenzuela, 42; and Christopher Quang Vo, 22. One individual’s name was withheld by the court.
The attack against PayPal was launched after the company suspended accounts for WikiLeaks after the whistle-blower site released a large amount of sensitive State Department cables.
“The San Jose 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 Justice Department said.
Tuesday’s arrests were part of a concerted effort to rein in online attacks, the agency said, but this particular attack had been one chapter in an episode that led to massive disclosures about U.S. diplomacy abroad.
“Also today, FBI agents executed more than 35 search warrants throughout the United States as part of an ongoing investigation into coordinated cyberattacks against major companies and organizations,” the Justice Department added.
Additionally, the United Kingdom’s police service arrested one person and the Dutch police agency arrested four individuals for alleged related cybercrimes.
The FBI also arrested Scott Matthew Arciszewski, 21, on charges of intentional damage to a protected computer after he allegedly accessed, without authorization, the Tampa Bay InfraGard website and uploaded three files.
A related complaint unsealed in the District of New Jersey charges Lance Moore, 21, with allegedly stealing confidential business information stored on AT&T’s servers and posting it on a public file-sharing site.
“According to the New Jersey complaint, Moore, a customer support contractor, exceeded his authorized access to AT&T’s servers and downloaded thousands of documents, applications, and other files that, on the same day, he allegedly posted on a public file-hosting site that promises user anonymity,” the Justice Department said.
“According to the complaint, on June 25, 2011, the computer hacking group LulzSec publicized that they had obtained confidential AT&T documents and made them publicly available on the Internet. The documents were the ones Moore had previously uploaded,” the department added.
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