Police Make New Arrest In Anonymous Probe

British police have made another arrest as part of their ongoing investigation of the hacktivist group Anonymous.

Scotland Yard told eWEEK Europe UK just before Christmas that they had been investigating Anonymous for some time following a spate of attacks. And in late January the police then revealed that they had arrested five people suspected of being involved in the Anonymous DDoS attacks.

The five men, aged 15, 16, 19, 20 and 26, had been arrested in connection with offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. The arrests took took place at residential addresses in the West Midlands, Northants, Herts, Surrey and London on 27 January.

It is understood that these five suspects are currently on bail and have to report to police stations sometime in June.

Sixth Arrest

And now the police have arrested a sixth person, according to the Daily Telegraph.

The new suspect is said to be a 22-year-old man from Cleveland, in the north east of England. The suspect was apparently questioned at a local police station by specialist computer crime detectives presumably from the Met’s Police Central e-Crime Unit (PceU).

The man was bailed until 26 May pending further enquiries.

The arrests are part of the ongoing police investigation into the Anonymous group. The hacktivist group first came to light last year when it was thought to be the group behind a number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

DDoS Attacks

The law firm Gallant Macmillan and its client, Ministry of Sound were hacked in October. Both firms were targeted after they sued for the details of PlusNet subscribers who may have downloaded music illegally. And in November Anonymous claimed credit for taking down the website of the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) as revenge for the legal action against The Pirate Bay.

Anonymous was also identified as being behind attacks against the government websites of Zimbabwe and Tunisia.

But things stepped up a gear after a fierce cyber war erupted in December, following the arrest of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who was later freed on bail.

Subsequent DDoS attacks by Anonymous brought down the websites of PayPal and Mastercard, because they had stopped processing payments for WikiLeaks after it published leaks of classified US diplomatic cables.

Assange is currently awaiting the results of an extradition appeal against a decision to extradite him to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.