The FBI raided the offices of 4Chan, an Internet Service Provider, which allegedly hosted anonymous accounts used in WikiLeaks “Operation Payback” attacks against Governor Palin, among several other targets, The Smoking Gun today reported. 4chan also was involved in the 2008 hacking of Gov. Palin’s private email accounts.
The FBI investigation began earlier this month after PayPal officials contacted agents and “reported that an Internet activist group using the names ‘4chan’ and “Anonymous” appeared to be organizing a distributed denial of service (“DDoS”) attack against the company,” according to an FBI affidavit excerpted here.
The PayPal assault was part of “Operation Payback,” an organized effort to attack firms that suspended or froze WikiLeaks’s accounts in the wake of the group’s publication of thousands of sensitive Department of State cables. As noted by the FBI, other targets of this “Anonymous” effort included Visa, Mastercard, Sarah Palin’s web site, and the Swedish prosecutor pursuing sex assault charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder.
On December 9, PayPal investigators provided FBI agents with eight IP addresses that were hosting an “Anonymous” Internet Relay Chat (IRC) site that was being used to organize denial of service attacks. The unidentified administrators of this IRC “then acted as the command and control” of a botnet army of computers that was used to attack target web sites.
The Smoking Gun’s source document pertaining to the DDOS attack on PayPal can be viewed here.
US District Court Denies Subpoena of Gov. Palin’s Emails references 4chan‘s involvement in hacking her email accounts. The “anonymous” account hosted by 4chan may or may not have been involved with the attacks on SarahPAC, Conservatives4Palin, Organize4Palin, PalinTV, and Tammy Bruce.
Yesterday, US 4 Palin started a Money Bomb to help SarahPAC recover 2011 campaign funds it had to use to repair its site and secure it against further DDOS attacks.
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