EA Cyber-Watch: Anonymous Launches Another Campaign Against PayPal

James Dunne summarises the latest cyber-manoeuvres, as the collective Anonymous resumes its campaign against PayPal:

On Wednesday, the Web-based shopping outlet eBay opened to a 1% fall in its shares on the US stock market. The cause? The computer "hacktivists" Anonymous has resumed its campaign against the online payment company PayPal.

Last year, Anonymous launched a campaign against PayPal, as well as other financial and credit services like Visa and MasterCard, after the company refused to process donations to WikiLeaks, the website which had downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified US documents. 

Now #OpPayPal, called by Anonymous and their associates at LulzSec and Wikileaks, is protesting the company’s compliance with the FBI to charge and fine online actvisists. Mercedes Haefer, a 20-year-old Social Sciences student at the University of Nevada, is one of 14 defendants facing charges of "conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer", having taking part in a denial-of-service attack, with a possible sentence of 15 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. 

PayPal is the latest target for Anonymous and their fellow so-called hacktivist groups. In past weeks, these have included NATO, the leading US Government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and CNAIPIC, the Italian IT infrastructure protection bureau.  The targets are loosely associated under the continuing campaign of Anonymous and LulzSec, #AntiSec, whose first documents were released one month ago yesterday.

The share price of eBay gradually bounced back from a 4% drop. However, the same bounce-back had yet to be seen yesterday in PayPal users. Sources in IRC rooms --- the home of information regarding Anonymous --- are reporting that 1100 users have now dispensed with their accounts, and an unconfirmed post from Anonymous claimed upwards of 20,000 users had departed PayPal. That is a drop in the ocean of 200+ million accounts. However, if Anonymous continues to garner support at its current rate of expansion --- and evaded global efforts by numerous authorities to stamp out hacktivism --- this may be only the first skirmish in a long campaign.