Raids in Texas Over Wikileaks.org Mirrors

The FBI has made its first raid on a company thought to be involved in initiating the DDoS attacks in defence of Wikileaks.org.

PayPal first contacted the FBI in early December stating that “an Internet activist group using the names ‘4chan’ and “Anonymous” appeared to be organizing a distributed denial of service (“DDoS”) attack against the company”. The attacks were made in retaliation to PayPal’s refusal to provide Wikileaks.org with their financial services after the site had posted over 250,000 confidential Government documents.

Since PayPal reported the attacks, both Anonymous and 4chan have claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as admitting to launching attacks on MasterCard, Visa and Amazon, all of whom also denied services to Wikileaks. Attacks were also launched on Sarah Palin’s website, Swiss bank PostFinance, the Bank of America and the Swedish prosecution service dealing with the rape and molestation charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It is thought that the attacks mainly originate from Anonymous who have taken on alter egos by the names of ‘Operation: Payback’ and ‘Operation Avenge Assange’.

Two arrests have already been made with regards to the attacks; however, it has taken the FBI over four weeks to asses a number of IP addresses they had been given by PayPal and they have recently associated Texas based dedicated server company, Tailor Made Servers, to the attacks.

A raid on the company only resulted in the FBI taking copies of one of the Tailor Made servers which was believed to have been hosting an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) site from which the DDoS attacks on PayPal and other were launched from.

Using the IP addresses supplied to them by PayPal, the FBI investigated a number of other French, German and English sites that were potentially involved in the attacks, including a site in British Columbia, Canada and a Germany-based Internet service provide, Host Europe.

So far no further arrests have been made as a result of these raids however the FBI are continuing to investigate the leads.