Sixteen suspected members of "Anonymous" were arrested this morning in states including Florida, New Jersey and California, in what appears to be a nationwide takedown of the notorious hacking group, FoxNews.com has exclusively learned.
The arrests and the 30 to 40 search warrants issued by the feds Tuesday are part of an ongoing investigation into Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for numerous cyberattacks against a variety of websites including Visa and Mastercard.
Fourteen of the arrests were identified in the same indictment, while two separate criminal complaints filed out of courts in Newark, N.J., and Tampa, Fla., name the two other alleged hackers. All are believed to have been involved in carrying out nationwide coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on multiple high-profile, billion-dollar companies.
Some of the arrests were out of the San Francisco field office, sources said, activity that followed searches earlier in the day in the New York area at residences believed to be associated with members of the hacking collective, FoxNews.com has learned.
“I can confirm that we’re conducting law enforcement actions relating to a criminal investigation,” said Alicia Sensibaugh, a spokeswoman for FBI’s San Francisco office, out of which sources said multiple search warrants were executed Tuesday morning.
Earlier in the day, the FBI executed search warrants at the New York homes -- two in Long Island, N.Y., and one in Brooklyn, N.Y. -- of three suspected members of Anonymous, FoxNews.com reported.
Read more:
Wiki Info
The metropolitan police in London arrested the first alleged member of the LulzSec group on June 20, a 19-year-old teen named Ryan Cleary. Subsequent sweeps through Italy and Switzerland in early July led to the arrests of 15 more people -- all between the ages of 15 and 28 years old.
No comments:
Post a Comment