Agents of the FBI raided three homes in New York on Tuesday and seized computers believed to be involved in recent attacks by the Anonymous hacking group.
FBI Agents raided three homes in Brooklyn, Baldwin and Merrick, New York at 6:00 AM, armed with search warrants seeking computers and related accessories. The searches stemmed from an ongoing investigation into distributed denial of service attacks against a number of organizations, according to FBI Supervisory Special Agent Tim Flannelly.
Computers at the homes were linked to denial of service attacks by their IP address, but no individuals were arrested in the searches, Flannelly said. Law Enforcement officials told Fox News that Jordan’s system had been used to coordinate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on several companies.
The searches are the latest in a string of similar raids in response to an ongoing Anonymous campaign of DDoS attacks and Web site hacks directed at corporate and government entities, including Visa, PayPal, Amazon, Booz Allen Hamilton. Some attacks were in retaliation for corporate action against the whistleblower site WikiLeaks. A spin off collective, LulzSec, also carried out attacks against Sony, the FBI’s Infraguard Program, U.S. Senate servers, and the CIA.
Though the computer equipment seized is believed to contain information relevant to the investigation, it is not clear whether the individuals who lived at those residences played an active role in the attacks, or were passive or unwitting participants in them. Law Enforcement agencies from around the globe have arrested Anonymous members in the Netherlands, Spain and Turkey among other locales. However, many of those arrests were of low-level foot soldiers, many teenagers who downloaded and installed a tool called LOIC that allows individual computers to be harnessed in denial of service attacks organized by Anonymous.
In June, alleged senior Anonymous member Ryan Clearly was arrested in the U.K. Shortly after that, the FBI raided the home of an unnamed teen in Ohio believed to have played a role in the hacks of U.S. and British government Web sites.
