Andre Yoskowitz
4 Oct 2013 8:22
Thirteen alleged members of Anonymous have been indicted this week due to their part in "Operation Payback," a series of attacks in which the group avenged The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks.
The thirteen are charged with attacks between September 2010 and January 2011 on the MPAA, RIAA, Bank of America, Visa and Mastercard. The defendants are charged with organizing the DDoS attacks on the websites of the major corporations.
Anonymous attacked the MPAA and RIAA for their parts in getting The Pirate Bay banned in numerous countries, and the financial institutions were attacked because they began blocking funds to Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange.
Reads the indictment: "The defendants planned and executed a coordinated series of cyber-attacks against victim websites by flooding those websites with a huge volume of irrelevant Internet traffic with the intent to make the resources on the websites unavailable to customers and users of those websites."
The alleged attackers are Dennis Owen Collins, Jeremy Leroy Heller, Chen Zhiwei, Joshua Phy, Ryan Russel Gubele, Robert Audubon Whitfield, Anthony Tadros, Geoffrey Kenneth Commander, Austen Stamm, Timothy Robert McLain, Wade Carl Williams and Thomas Bell.