The FBI is executing search warrants at two Long Island, N.Y., homes and one Brooklyn, N.Y., home of three suspected members of notorious hacking group Anonymous early Tuesday morning, FoxNews.com has learned.
More than 10 FBI agents arrived at the Baldwin, N.Y., home of Giordani Jordan with a search warrant for computers and computer-related accessories.
The targets of the FBI searches are all in their late teens to early 20s.
Jordan’s system was identified as allegedly being used in a coordinated distributed denial of service attack against several companies, a law enforcement official told FoxNews.com.
Tuesday’s search warrants are part of an ongoing investigation into Anonymous and its alleged retaliatory attacks. The Anonymous group is a loose collection of cybersavvy activists inspired by WikiLeaks and its flamboyant head Julian Assange to fight for Internet freedom – along the way defacing websites, shutting down servers, and scrawling messages across screens web-wide.
The Anonymous vigilante group has recently turned its efforts to the Arizona police department, posting personal information of law officers and hacking and defacing websites in response the group claims to the state’s controversial SB1070 immigration law.
While Anonymous is largely a politically motivated organization, splinter group LulzSec — which dominated headlines in the spring for a similar streak of cyber attacks — was largely in it for the thrills.
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.
The two groups are responsible for a broad spate of digital break-ins targeting governments and large corporations, including Japanese technology giant Sony, the U.S. Senate, telecommunications giant AT&T, Fox.com, British paper The Sun, and other government and private entities.
One Response
No…anonymous started way before wikileaks…