With yesterday’s nationwide ‘hacvtivist’-hunt, there’s already a total of 16 arrests that were made, 14 of which came from California.  There’s also one from Newark, New Jersey and another from Tampa, Florida.  The 14 hackers are suspected to be involved in the hacking of the servers of PayPal.

“In retribution for PayPal’s termination of WikiLeaks’ donation account, a group calling itself Anonymous coordinated and executed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal’s computer servers using an open source computer program the group makes available for free download on the Internet,” the Justice Department said in a news release.

The indictment names 14 people: Christopher Wayne Cooper, 23, a.k.a. “Anthrophobic;” Joshua John Covelli, 26, a.k.a. “Absolem” and “Toxic;” Keith Wilson Downey, 26; Mercedes Renee Haefer, 20, a.k.a. “No” and “MMMM;” Donald Husband, 29, a.k.a. “Ananon;” Vincent Charles Kershaw, 27, a.k.a. “Trivette,” “Triv” and “Reaper;” Ethan Miles, 33; James C. Murphy, 36; Drew Alan Phillips, 26, a.k.a. “Drew010;” Jeffrey Puglisi, 28, a.k.a. “Jeffer,” “Jefferp” and “Ji;” Daniel Sullivan, 22; Tracy Ann Valenzuela, 42; and Christopher Quang Vo, 22. One individual’s name has been withheld by the court, which suggests he or she is a juvenile.

The other two arrested are Scott Matthew Arciszewski and Lance Moore.  Arciszewski was charged with intentional damage to a protected computer while Moore was charged with stealing confidential business information stored on AT&T’s servers and posting it on a public file-sharing site.

On a related note, a 16-year-old member of LulzSec is in custody of UK authorities.  The arrest is still part of the worldwide hacker sweep.