Charge follows investigation into attacks by hacking collective Anonymous on sites including Mastercard and PayPal
A British student was charged on Thursday following a police investigation into online attacks in January on sites including Mastercard and PayPal by the international hacking collective Anonymous.
Peter David Gibson, from Hartlepool, will appear before magistrates at Westminster magistrates court in London on 7 September, accused of conspiracy to do an unauthorised act in relation to a computer, Scotland Yard said.
The 22-year-old was arrested and granted bail in April as part of the force's investigation into a string of high-profile attacks on companies that Anonymous had allegedly targeted because they stopped forwarding donation payments to WikiLeaks.
Gibson has been charged with conspiracy to "do an unauthorised act in relation to a computer, with intent to impair the operation of any computer or prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in a computer or to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of such data," said the Metropolitan police. That is contrary to Section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977. The police did not cite the Computer Misuse Act, which is more usually applied in cases relating to computing.
Other sites targeted in the attack in January included Amazon and Bank of America. Members of Anonymous used a piece of open source software called LOIC – for Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a joking reference to its ability to "obliterate" sites – to create "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks to make the sites inaccessible.
The UK police arrested six people in their probe into what Anonymous dubbed "Operation Avenge Assange". The five other UK-based men – aged, 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26 – were arrested, following coordinated police raids in the West Midlands, Northants, Herts, Surrey and London, under the Computer Misuse Act in January this year.
In the US, 16 people were arrested in July following the January attacks. The FBI is reportedly working through a list of around 1,000 internet IP addresses that were identified by PayPal as sources of the DDOS attacks in the same operation.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/25/british-student-charged-online-attacks
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