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elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

The PayPal website has experienced multiple DDOS attacks this week following its decision to suspend Wikileaks' account. The first distributed denial of service attack was on Monday and lasted a half hour, according to PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar. Transactions were not affected, but as far as the user experience, the site may have been a little slower, he said.

Wikileaks, a non-profit media organization "dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public," is at the center of a major global controversy after it began publishing documents that exposed U.S. diplomatic secrets. A group calling itself Anonymous coordinated the DDOS attacks against PayPal and Mastercard and Visa in retaliation for closing Wikileaks accounts in what it calls Operation Payback.

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dticorp · Joined: 19 Aug 2006 Posts: 1760

Update:

U.S. Arrests 14 for Roles in PayPal Cyber Attack

U.S. authorities Tuesday arrested 16 people on charges they participated in major cyber attacks, including the crippling of 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 take down so far tied to the high-profile cyber attack.

Rest of the article here;
http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2011/07/19/us-arrests-14-for-roles-in-paypal-cyber-attack/

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elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

Update:

"Suspects in PayPal web attack not so anonymous after all"

Some of the suspects accused of participating in a December attack organized by the Anonymous hacker collective that caused numerous service disruptions on PayPal were shocked to learn that the net isn't all that anonymous, or that it's illegal to impair other people's computers.

According to The New York Times, some of the 14 people charged with carrying out denial-of-service attacks on the eBay-owned payment service saw no need to cover their tracks because they didn't know what they were doing was a felony.

Among them was Keith Downey, a 26-year-old self-taught programmer from Jacksonville, Florida. Angered by PayPal's decision to stop processing donations to WikiLeaks, he elected to register his dismay by joining in the attacks using a home computer that he took no steps to anonymize. According to the NYT, he likened the web attack to college sit-ins of the 1970s and to Gandhi's civil disobedience movement against British rule in India.

With the seizure of his computer equipment by the FBI in January and his arrest last week, he is now "patching together construction work to make ends meet" and trying to figure out how to cover the cost of traveling to California to attend a court hearing scheduled for September.

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elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 17240 Location: Texas

Latest:

"Paypal hands over 1,000 IP addresses of Anonymous attackers"

When Anonymous took up arms against Paypal last year for freezing Wikileaks‘ account and launched DDoS attacks against the billing and payment company, some of the attackers apparently left behind enough information to be traceable. Paypal is reporting that they’ve handed over a list of 1,000 IP addresses to the FBI of individuals they believe to be behind part of the attack.

The problem with investigating DDoS attacks is that they’re usually orchestrated by zombie computer systems – or computers that are infected with Trojans, often unknown to the user. Those systems then, without the owners’ knowledge, take part in large-scale attacks against websites. Similarly, masking your IP address is a basic skill for hackers – it’s essentially the equivalent of hiding your face when you rob a bank: if you don’t, you’re not terribly clever.

To that end, there’s no way to know whether the list of IP addresses are just a dump of attacking systems or whether Paypal’s investigation turned up some indication that these thousand IP addresses were orchestrating the attack. The statement from Paypal claims that the dump contained IP addresses that “sent malicious network packets” during the attacks, which isn’t very descriptive. They do allude to the notion that the addresses they handed over are some of the IPs that sent the most data.

For example, one of the IP addresses belonged to a computer in a home of a family in Arlington, Texas, and the PayPal data was used as evidence to get a warrant to search that home. Expect the same for the other systems on the list, if they can be found as easily. There’s no doubt that the FBI is already sifting through the list to determine whether any of the other addresses match individual households or known activists.

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