14 DAY TRIAL // A total of 13 individuals suspected of taking part in Operation Payback, the Anonymous campaign initiated in 2010, have been indicted by a US federal grand jury.
According to the indictment, Dennis Owen Collins, Jeremy Leroy Heller, Zhiwei Chen, Joshua S. Phy, Ryan Russell Gubele, Robert Audubon Whitfield, Anthony Tadros, Geoffrey Kenneth Commander, Phillip Garrett Simpson, Austen L. Stamm, Timothy Robert Mcclain, Wade Carl Williams, and Thomas J. Bell had taken part in cyberattacks launched between mid-September 2010 and early January 2011.
They’re accused of conspiring to “to knowingly cause the transmission of a program, information, code, and command, and, as a result of such conduct, intentionally cause damage, and attempt to cause damage, without authorization, to a protected computer.”
The list of organizations allegedly attacked by those involved in Operation Payback is long. They’re said to have launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against several websites with the tool known as Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC).
Their first target was the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which they attacked in retaliation against the shutdown of The Pirate Bay.
They have also launched attacks against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), British Phonographic Institute (BPI), British law firm Davenport Lyons, anti-piracy outfit AiPlex, Anti-piracy.nl, and intellectual property groups BREIN and ACS:Law.
Later, they focused on the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), the Association of Commercial Audiovisual of Portugal (ACAPOR), France’s Trident Media Guard, DGLegal, Hadopi, British record label Ministry of Sound, the Spanish General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE), and the Federal Italian Music Industry.
In December 2010, they turned their attention to entities that refused to process payments for WikiLeaks, including MasterCard and Visa.
Other organizations targeted in December 2010 were Bank of America, Arbor Networks, Amazon, the Recording Industry of South Africa, PostFinance, the Metropolitan Police in London and the British court system.