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Student hacker charged for his involvement with Anonymous
Peter Gibson, a 22-year old student from Hartlepool, England has been charged by British Police for his involvement in the Distributed Denial of Service attacks on payment companies back in December 2010, after they withdrew support for donations being made to Wikileaks.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are favored by Anonymous. It works by flooding the servers with traffic, overloading them, and subsequently causing the servers to crash, or become otherwise unreachable.
Gibson, who was arrested back in April 2011, has been charged under the Computer Misuse Act for his part in the attacks on Mastercard, Visa and PayPal last December, after they froze donations being made to Wikileaks, in part due to continued pressure from the United States government regarding their defiant release of sensitive US communications.
At the time, Amazon and Bank of America were also targeted, but it’s not clear if these two attacks are related to Gibson's involvement. He is the first person to be charged during the Criminal investigations into the attacks by the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crimes Unit.
In January four other people were arrested, though they were released on bail. A fifth person was also arrested, but later released without charge. Gibson is the first British person involved in the attacks to be charged.
Anonymous believe the attacks are nothing more than civil disobedience, but the British Courts are likely to view the charges more seriously. Gibson could face a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison if found guilty under the British Computer Misuse Act.
User Comments: 8
Got something to say? Post a comment-
RH00D said:
inb4 I hate Anonymous.
But really, if Anonymous wants to even change anything they are going to have to keep doing things on the level of the HBGary attacks or better than that. This DDoS crap isn't doing anything but annoying people.
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NTAPRO said:
I wonder what will this will lead to in the next 2 months..
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The more often they play the fool and lash out, the more information they leave behind for the police to follow.. so go for it you bunch of uber geeks.
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funny how fast these losers want to be big guys yet sell out there friends once they face legal action. i expect a lot more arrests coming.
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Jailing him for 10 years will create a martyr.
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matrix86 said:
Guest said:funny how fast these losers want to be big guys yet sell out there friends once they face legal action. i expect a lot more arrests coming.
......um, how have they sold anyone out? They didn't turn the guy in. I'm not standing up for them, just trying to figure out how you came upon that thought process.
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IF he goes to jail anonymous will more than likely attack on a much wider scale until he is released
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@tomcolgan
All they'll do is DDoS.
There are new countermeasures to that since their last attacks
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