EA Cyber-Watch: Anonymous Launches Another 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.

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EA Cyber-Special: LulzSec Dumps Its Documents and Says Good-Bye

The LulzSec crew, having sailed merrily into the waters of hacktivism this spring, has now dumped their treasure overboard and set course for calmer seas, no doubt with a fleet of law enforcement in pursuit.

The files released last night appear to be the user accounts of the cracked NATO bookshop customer database, an archive of AT&T corporate data, and an image establishing that LulzSec has cracked the US Navy's website. Details of accounts of gamers and those on other forums, an output of network data labelled "FBI being silly", and 91 pages of IP addresses whose routers were using default passwords were also included.

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EA Cyber-Special: What is LulzSec? And Is It More than a Bit of LOL and Mischief? (Dunne)

LulzSec's "Pierre DuBois"LulzSec --- the mischievous internet group responsible for infiltrating servers at Sony, Sega and the International Monetary, as well as disabling Government websites on both sides of the Atlantic --- has expanded its operation, codenamed AntiSec, to South America. Early on Wednesday, the group claimed to have disabled two websites of the Brazilian Government, Portal Brazil and the site of President Dilma Vana Rousseff.

The group maintains it is acting simply "for the Lulz", a play on "LOL", getting amusement from random digital anarchy. Fridays become "FF", the designated day of the week for dissemination of stolen material.

But is there a significance beyond mischief and laughs?

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