13 alleged memebers of the hacktivist group Anonymous were indicted by a federal grand jury, as described in an 28-page indictment unsealed Thursday in an Alexandria, Virgina US district court.  The indictment describes a series of online attacks in an that were launched under the banner of “Operation Payback”.  The attacks were distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) and started in 2010 as retaliation for actions made against the Swedish torrent site The Pirate Bay.  The Pirate Bay had been shutdown in a campaign against piracy and Anonymous fired back, attacking the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), and the United States Copyright Office.  They also targeted Bank of America, and the credit card companies Visa and MasterCard as the campaign expanded.  Those institutions had refused to process WikiLeaks payments.

…participated in a worldwideconspiracy as part of the online group ANONYMOUS in a campaign dubbed “OPERATIONPAYBACK” (or “OPERATION: PAYBACK IS A BITCH,”) to engage in a coordinated seriesof cyber-attacks against victims.

The indictment named the following 13 parties as the Anonymous members – Dennis Owen Collins, Anthony Tadros, Ryan Russel Gubele, Jeremy Leroy Heller, Chen Zhiwei, Joshua Phy, Robert Audubon Whitfield, Thomas Bell, Austen Stamm, Timothy Robert McLain, Wade Carl Williams and Geoffrey Kenneth Commander.  They are each charged with conspiracy to intentionally cause damage to a protected computer.

The DDoS attacks flooded the target sites with volumes of garbage requests until they were unavailable for other web users.  The indictment describes the coordination, targeting and execution of the attacks, but little on how the defendants were discovered despite some clues.

..ANONYMOUS, planned and executed a coordinated series of cyber-attacks against victim websites by flooding those websites with a huge volume of irrelevant Internet traffic with the intent to make the resources on the websites unavailable to customers and users of those websites. This method of online attack is known as a Distributed Denial of Service (“DDoS”) attack.

The attacks even got personal at one point with a report of a public release of personal information belonging to the Bank of America CEO.

On or about December 29, 2010, in #operationpayback, defendant WADE CARLWILLIAMS, as “TheMiNd,” posted a link to flier which identified the CEO of Bank of Americaand his wife by their names, home address, and phone number, for harassment

The charges for this kind of crime have been quite punitive in recent news and Anonymous has been a thorn in law enforcement’s side for some time.  The indictment is very thorough on the numerous events, a hallmark of a deep investigation.  It bears reason that the successful prosecution and punitive verdict of this case is a prime objective.  If indeed these are Anonymous members and can be tied to this operation, an important piece of the story will be exactly how they were caught.  After the Silk Road bust, and as the second major cyber bust in a week, the landscape of hacktivists and underground activity has changed just that quickly.  There are always people that step up, there are always lessons that people that engage in those activities take away, and the fight will go on.  In the meantime, it seems the noose has tightened within this community for the time being.