Law enforcement raids target Operation: Payback

December 31, 2010 By Geoff Duncan

Authorities in the U.S. and Germany have raided ISPs looking for evidence in DDOS attacks against Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and others.

Authorities in the United States and Germany have launched raids against Internet Service Providers they suspect may have been involved in DDOS attacks against the likes of Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal as part of “Operation: Payback.” Germany’s Federal Criminal Policy have raided ISP Host Europe after reportedly connecting an IRC server there to Tailor Made Services in Dallas, while documents posted to the Smoking Gun Web site indicate the FBI seized hard drives earlier this month from systems at Tailor Made Services and California’s Hurricane Electric. The documents indicate the FBI has also traced IRC hosting addresses to ISPs in Canada and France.

According to the materials, the FBI got involved in the action when Operation: PayBack launched an intial attack on PayPal’s blog. The blog was rendered inaccessible for several hours, and was attacked again several days later. According to the FBI, the attack against PayPal was launched from the Dallas computers.

The Operation: Payback DDOS attacks were launched in retaliation for Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, and other organizations withdrawing financial services from Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Although the attacks were disruptive to public portions of sites, with the exception of Switzerland’s PostFinance they did not interfere with customer operations or transactions. The attacks may have been more valuable for the publicity they gathered for Anonymous and Wikileaks: the FBI documents note that Operation: Payback recruited users to voluntary participate in its botnet attacks using Twitter and other mechanisms. So far there has only been one arrest in connection to the attacks: Dutch authorities arrested a 16-year-old boy in connection with Operation: Payback on December 9.

In the past, Anonymous has targeted groups like the Motion Picture Association of America and American politician Sarah Palin with similar attacks.

Showing 11 comments

Therese at 12:18am 1st January 2011 So they are going after these teenages because they took down a blog site - is that it?
1. Anonymous at 12:01pm 1st January 2011 Those teens took down visa, mastercard, and paypal you dislexic mongol.
  1. Also Anonymous at 4:12pm 2nd January 2011 FTA "Although the attacks were disruptive to public portions of sites, with the exception of Switzerland’s PostFinance they did not interfere with customer operations or transactions." If the customer transactions were being processed, it sounds to me like Therese got it right cause they didn't take down diddly squat now did they sparky?
anon at 3:11pm 31st December 2010 They backtraced it
Anonymous at 12:54pm 31st December 2010 You can't DDoS from a proxy. You can DDoS, however, from a shared location. Maybe these federal dirtbags should go after companies which violate WikiLeaks' right to receive donations.
1. Chris at 1:48pm 31st December 2010 You sound crazy. WikiLeaks can receive donations but the banks are obligated to help them in any way.
Derp at 12:53pm 31st December 2010 hurr durrr
iDeving at 12:13pm 31st December 2010 wow, this articles title is way misleading... not only that, this article is pointless, they raided isps! who cares! that means absolutely nothing, has nothing to do with anonymous's identity / location / lack of secrecy. Ofc these guys r gunna use proxies without trace-routs duh! the ISP hosting the IRC chats r not going to give u locations! our government is retarded in the field of web hunting...
1. Anonymous at 12:17pm 31st December 2010 These guys all have norton and are behind seven proxies. The government has their work cut out for them
Anonymous at 12:12pm 31st December 2010 Actually it looks like the FBI are striking.
Anonymous at 11:50am 31st December 2010 LOL /b/ strikes again!