Authorities in the United States and Europe have arrested 21 people on charges they participated in major cyber attacks.
FBI agents arrested 14 people in nine states and Washington, DC, for an attempt to cripple eBay's PayPal website as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks as a client. The PayPal attack, which occurred last December, was allegedly co-ordinated by the hacking group Anonymous.
Another related arrest came in New Mexico where an employee for a contractor for AT&T's wireless service faces charges of accessing a computer without authorisation by allegedly downloading thousands of documents related to its 4G data network and LTE mobile broadband network.
The data was subsequently downloaded to a file-sharing web site in April and another one of the loosely organised groups of hackers, Lulz Security, subsequently publicised the data breach, the complaint said. AT&T had no comment on the arrest.
The other man arrested by FBI agents was in Florida, where he was charged with illegally accessing Tampa Bay Infragard's website and uploading three malicious files. The group is an FBI-sponsored organisation focused on critical infrastructure.
The US Justice Department said British police arrested one person and Dutch authorities arrested four for cyber crimes related to recent attacks on major companies and organisations.
It was the biggest response by authorities tied to a recent spate of high-profile cyber attacks.
Financial institutions like PayPal, Visa and MasterCard withdrew services from WikiLeaks last year after the website published thousands of sometimes embarrassing secret US diplomatic reports that have caused strains between Washington and numerous allies.
Hackers responded with so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks that flooded the companies' websites with requests for information and rendered them unavailable to legitimate users, according to the indictment filed in federal court in San Jose, California.
PayPal suffered attacks for several days last December.
The 14 individuals were charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison if convicted, and intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.
The accused ranged in age from 20 to 42 and lived in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.
Police believe Anonymous is mostly made up of hackers believed to be in their teens and early 20s. The group has taken credit for numerous attacks, including attacks on Bank of America, Sony and the Malaysian government.
Reuters