Five supposed members of the hacker group Anonymous were arrested in the United Kingdom today.
Anonymous recently made available an application called LOIC to assist its members in performing internet attacks, but the program doesn’t do anything to hide the users’ personal information. Perhaps that’s how the Scotland Yard Police Central e-Crime Unit was able to target five individuals early Thursday morning in coordinated raids throughout lower England. These five hackers, aged 15 to 26, are no longer anonymous.
“The arrests are in relation to recent and ongoing ‘distributed denial of service’ attacks (DDoS) by an online group calling themselves Anonymous,” read a statement released by Scotland Yard about the raids.
Taking place in the jurisdictions of West Midlands, Northants, Herts, Surrey and London, each of the alleged hackers were taken to their local police precincts for questioning. The e-criminals will likely be charged under the UK’s Computer Misuse Act but no formal arraignment has been made.
The hammer was bound to drop. Anonymous was born from the miasma that is the 4chan forum where users can post whatever crazy crap they can make, adapt or get their hands on. As a somewhat more militant or socio-political arm of 4chan, Anonymous became famous for its protests against Scientology and its DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks on websites from GeneSimmons.com to PayPal and Visa in support of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks.
As more and more seek to join the ranks of Anonymous, not all of them will be as adept at hiding their tracks as the hackers of yore. Cyberpolice such as the Scotland Yard e-Crime Unit have also apparently stepped up their own hacking skills so what may be a game for these young men has quickly become dangerous.
*Sigh* Hacking’s just not like it used to be…
Thanks to The_root_of_all_evil for the tip.
Source: The Register
Published: Jan 27, 2011 10:34 pm