Oct 04, 2013
A U.S. Grand jury indicted and accused 13 members of the hacking group Anonymous for allegedly participating in the cyber attacks against a number of websites as an anti-copyright campaign called " Operation Payback " Hackers took down the sites by inflicting a denial of service, or DDoS, attack , including those belonging to the Recording Industry Association of America, Visa and MasterCard. The attacks were in retaliation for the shutdown of " The Pirate Bay ," a Sweden-based file-sharing website used to illegally download copyrighted material. The DDoS Campaign was later extended to Bank of America and credit card companies such as Visa and MasterCard after they refused to process payments for WikiLeaks . According to the indictment, the suspects are charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to protected computers. Suspects downloaded and used software known as Low Orbit Ion Cannon , or LOIC, to launch distributed denial-of-service