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Another Anonymous kid arrested

by on26 August 2011


Peter Gibson charged
A British student has been charged in connection with the hacking collective Anonymous raids on Mastercard and PayPal. Peter David Gibson, 22, from Hartlepool, will appear before magistrates at Westminster magistrates court in London in two weeks charged with conspiracy to do an unauthorised act in relation to a computer.

He has been granted bail in April as part of the force's investigation into a string of high-profile attacks on companies that Anonymous had allegedly targeted because they stopped forwarding donation payments to WikiLeaks. Gibson has been charged with conspiracy to "do an unauthorised act in relation to a computer, with intent to impair the operation of any computer or prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in a computer or to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of such data," said the Metropolitan police. That is contrary to Section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977. The police did not cite the Computer Misuse Act, which is more usually applied in cases relating to computing.

Other sites targeted in the attack in January included Amazon and Bank of America. Members of Anonymous used a piece of open source software called LOIC – for Low Orbit Ion Cannon, a joking reference to its ability to "obliterate" sites – to create "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attacks to make the sites inaccessible.

So far the UK coppers have arrested six people in their probe into what Anonymous dubbed "Operation Avenge Assange". The five other UK-based men – aged, 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26 – were arrested, following coordinated police raids in the West Midlands, Northants, Herts, Surrey and London, under the Computer Misuse Act in January this year.
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