Two hackers who carried out cyber attacks on PayPal, Mastercard and Visa – as well as a number of music sites – in support of WikiLeaks have been locked up in jail.
Christopher Weatherhead, 22, of Northampton; and Ashley Rhodes, 28, of Camberwell, London – both members of the Anonymous hacking group – have been jailed for 18 months and seven months respectively.
Co-defendant Peter Gibson, 24, of Hartlepool, was given a six-month sentence, suspended for two years, while the remaining co-defendant, Jake Birchall, 18, from Chester, will be sentenced on next month. The four men carried out so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in 2010 and 2011, using a free tool downloaded from the Internet.
According to the prosecution, Weatherhead took a leading role, although he denied any part in the hack, dubbed Operation Payback.
The sentences were handed down at Southwark Crown Court and are believed to be the first convictions for DDoS in the UK. Estimated to have cost PayPal £3.5m, the attack targeted a number of sites, although originally targeted just those involved in the music industry, including British Recorded Music Industry (BPI), the Ministry of Sound and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
But the hackers later broadened the attack to include revenge for WikiLeaks after the backlash against the site for publishing thousands of US diplomatic cables.
Judge Peter Testar said: “It is intolerable that, when an individual or a group disagrees with a particular entity’s activities, they should be free to curtail that activity by means of attacks such as those which took place in this case.”
