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The following content is from an older version of this website, and may not display correctly.US authorities raided a Dallas hosting company's facility in December in hopes of finding initiators of that month's cyber attacks on electronic payment processing service providers that discontinued services to WikiLeaks. As part of the same investigation, German police executed a warrant for a search of a German hosting company's offices.
Dallas-based Tailor Made Servers was raided on 16 Dec., identifying one of the servers reportedly used to host chat rooms with instructions on how to execute the attacks, Bloomberg reported. In Germany, police seized documents from Host Europe that implicated a server that had allegedly received instructions from the Dallas machine.
These were two of eight IP addresses implicated in hosting the chat rooms used to distribute instructions for downloading and running Low Orbit Ion Cannon. Users around the world could download the software and use it to initiate Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the electronic payment companies' websites.
PayPal, an eBay subsidiary and one of the targeted companies, reported to the FBI on 6 Dec. that a group indentifying itself as Anonymous or 4chan was preparing for a DDoS attack against its infrastructure, according to an FBI affidavit in support of a search warrant for the Tailor Made Servers facility.
The first attack on PayPal began around 11:44 am and was one of several. According to FBI, the attackers initiated "multiple, severe DDoS attacks against the PayPal website." The company's blog came under attack as well.
The alleged attackers said their motivation was "a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness every day."
On 8 Dec., PayPal's website came under attack again, which the FBI document characterized as "a large-scale, coordinated effort controlled by servers belonging to the group 'Anonymous.'"
Other targets included MasterCard, Visa and Moneybookers.com.
In November, WikiLeaks started publishing a collection of hundreds of thousands of cables exchanged between the US State Department and embassies around the world. Many of the documents were classified by the US government and several internet companies providing services to WikiLeaks discontinued serving the organization, citing lack of compliance with their policies.
Dallas-based Tailor Made Servers was raided on 16 Dec., identifying one of the servers reportedly used to host chat rooms with instructions on how to execute the attacks, Bloomberg reported. In Germany, police seized documents from Host Europe that implicated a server that had allegedly received instructions from the Dallas machine.
These were two of eight IP addresses implicated in hosting the chat rooms used to distribute instructions for downloading and running Low Orbit Ion Cannon. Users around the world could download the software and use it to initiate Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the electronic payment companies' websites.
PayPal, an eBay subsidiary and one of the targeted companies, reported to the FBI on 6 Dec. that a group indentifying itself as Anonymous or 4chan was preparing for a DDoS attack against its infrastructure, according to an FBI affidavit in support of a search warrant for the Tailor Made Servers facility.
The first attack on PayPal began around 11:44 am and was one of several. According to FBI, the attackers initiated "multiple, severe DDoS attacks against the PayPal website." The company's blog came under attack as well.
The alleged attackers said their motivation was "a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness every day."
On 8 Dec., PayPal's website came under attack again, which the FBI document characterized as "a large-scale, coordinated effort controlled by servers belonging to the group 'Anonymous.'"
Other targets included MasterCard, Visa and Moneybookers.com.
In November, WikiLeaks started publishing a collection of hundreds of thousands of cables exchanged between the US State Department and embassies around the world. Many of the documents were classified by the US government and several internet companies providing services to WikiLeaks discontinued serving the organization, citing lack of compliance with their policies.