16 charged with attacks on Paypal, AT&T and FBI

US prosecutors arrested and charged 14 people with involvement in a cyber attack on EBay Inc’s Paypal unit that the group Anonymous claims it instigated in retaliation for the online payment company suspending the account of WikiLeaks. An indictment unsealed yesterday in San Jose, California, charges the individuals with conspiracy and intentional damage to a computer. Two others from New Mexico and Florida were arrested on cyber-related charges for improper access to computer files, the Justice Department said in an e-mailed statement.

Separately, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, man who is a former fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics, was charged by the U.S. with hacking into a computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and stealing more than 4 million documents.

The arrests related to the Paypal attack were made in 10 states and the District of Columbia and 35 search warrants were executed across the U.S. as part of an investigation into coordinated computer attacks against major companies, according to the statement.

The charges stem from “denial of service attacks” which saturate targeted computers with communication requests so service is denied to legitimate users. According to the indictment, Anonymous was an online collective of individuals associated with collaborative hacking attacks motivated by political and social goals.