As Part of "Operation Payback," Dallas Server Company Raided By FBI

[Joanne98]

A virtual jaunt 'round the Western Hemisphere has led FBI investigators to anonymous users who appear to have used servers from a Dallas-based server company to disable and disrupt PayPal after the money-wiring site froze a WikiLeaks donations account earlier this month. The Smoking Gun has excerpts from the FBI affadavit, which details the federal investigation into "Operation Payback," a hacker-led (or activist-led, depending on whose side you're on) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. From the affidavit:
The attack appeared to be organized in response to PayPal's decision to suspend a WikiLeaks' PayPal account, which WikiLeaks was using to collect donations. The attackers, "Anonymous," described themselves as being "average Internet Citizens" and stated that their "motivation is a collective sense of being fed up with all the minor and major injustices we witness every day."
Multiple IP address traces took California-based agents to Germany, then France, then to Tailor Made, which has its headquarters on Irving Boulevard.

Tailor Made Servers were being used to host an Internet Relay Chat site from which the DDoS attack was directed and launched. Hackers encoded this message with their execution commands: "Good_night,_paypal_Sweet_dreams_from_AnonOPs". DDoS attacks essentially send many, many packets of unnecessary information to a server, which then tries to reply to those packets, creating a huge traffic jam and blocking legitimate exchanges.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2010/12/dallas_server_company_raided_b.php

[girl gone mad]

1. Have they caught the DDoSers who took down WikiLeaks yet?

[hootinholler]

2. I wonder if the users on the IRC had an anonimizer channel to the chat server.

I'm not sure exactly how they were directing the DDOS, if it was via a subscription to an IRC channel there is potential to map the bot array. Or at least the connections that weren't anonymized.

Anonymous may not be quite so, um, anonymous.

-Hoot