The hacktivists took it on the chin today, with word from London that British authorities arrested five people connected with the group “Anonymous,” which had been linked to attacks against financial companies that terminated service to Wikileaks following the release of a cache of secret U.S. documents.
Anonymous has most recently been linked to attacks against Tunisian and Egyptian government sites following protests in those countries, and in the past has been known for such exploits as targeting Scientology websites.
The attack against Visa, MasterCard and PayPal was successful in crippling those sites, if only briefly, by enlisting volunteer sympathizers to overwhelm their servers with page requests in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
European and U.S. authorities are coordinating an international investigation of crimes associated with the Wikileaks document dump.
eSecurity Planet has the details on the latest fallout from the Wikileaks imbroglio.