Anonymous

Following the arrest of 16 individuals in the U.S. and five in the U.K. and the Netherlands who are allegedly connected to the various cyber attacks organized by Anonymous, the hacktivist group continues its mission unabated.

According to the claims the group made on their Twitter account, they have managed to hack the servers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and exfiltrate around one GB of its restricted and confidential documents.

A joint statement issued by Anonymous and LulzSec has just been released on Pastebin:

Hello thar FBI and international law authorities,

We recently stumbled across the following article with amazement and a certain amount of amusement:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/20/138555799/fbi-arrests-alleged-anonymous-h…

Anonymous, the hacking group that saw some of its alleged members arrested Tuesday, had another blow to deal with Wednesday, albeit a lesser one: Its own social network page was hacked and defaced.

The group had announced earlier this week that it was just starting AnonPlus after its "Your Anon News" account was rejected by Google's new social network, Google+, for violating the site's standards.

The 14 people arrested Tuesday in a crackdown on the Anonymous hacking group are not suspected of having links to criminal gangs, terrorist networks or foreign governments. They are alleged only to have participated in attacks on PayPal's website, after that company cut off payments to WikiLeaks.

But the FBI was determined to go after them anyway.

The FBI on Wednesday charged 14 people, mostly twenty-somethings, for their alleged involvement in an Anonymous-inspired attack on the PayPal website in December.

The hackivist collective Anonymous issued a call to arms last year after a number of corporate websites, including Visa and MasterCard, cut ties with WikiLeaks after the whistleblower group published secret U.S. diplomatic cables. In the case of PayPal, the online payment company severed its relationship with WikiLeaks after claiming the organization violated its terms of service.

Computer crime authorities will be hoping that they have struck a significant blow against the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups, following a series of raids and arrests on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, 16 people have been arrested in connection with an internet attack last year against PayPal - an assault which was claimed by the loosely-knit hacktivist group known as "Anonymous", in retaliation for the website withdrawing support for WikiLeaks.

In the early hours of this morning, the FBI executed search warrants at to gather evidence at the homes of alleged members of the Anonymous hacktivist group.

According to a Fox News report, two homes in Long Island, New York, and one in Brooklyn, were searched by FBI agents looking for evidence that computers at the addresses had been used in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a number of websites.

Internet activist group Anonymous recently had their “Your Anon News” account banned from Google+ for posting content that violated the “Community Standards.” According to the organization’s website, Google also disabled the group’s Gmail account. At the time it was thought that this only affected “Your Anon News,” but it was later revealed that the shutdown hit “a handfull [sic] of Anonymous accounts.”

Agricultural biotech giant Monsanto confirmed today that it had been victimized by a hacking attack that the online activist collective Anonymous had announced on Tuesday.

Free-thinking citizens of the world:

Anonymous' Operation Green Rights calls your attention to an urgent situation in North America perpetuated by the boundless greed of the usual suspects: Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Oil Sands Ltd., Imperial Oil, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and many others. This week, activists are gathering along U.S. Highway 12 in Montana to protest the transformation of a serene wilderness into an industrial shipping route, bringing "megaloads" of refinery equipment to the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada.