Federal officials arrested 16 people accused of carrying out computer crimes that damaged or breached protected systems, including a December attack organized by the Anonymous hacker collective on PayPal that caused numerous service disruptions.
Fourteen suspects from 10 states were accused of participating in "Operation Avenge Assange," which sought to punish the eBay-owned payment service for suspending an account belonging to whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. Using a tool known as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon and distributed by Anonymous members, they allegedly helped to coordinate an attack that bombarded PayPal servers with more traffic than they were designed to handle.
Members of Anonymous gathered in internet relay channels to plan and carry out the attack against PayPal, which banned WikiLeaks a few weeks after publishing hundreds of thousands of classified US State Department memos. The indictment, which was filed last week in federal court in San Jos
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