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Dutch authorities said today that they have arrested a 16-year old hacker involved in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on the Web sites of MasterCard and PayPal.
The Dutch National Prosecutors Office said that the teen, who was not named, was arrested by a high-tech crime team last night.
The arrest comes after a group known as Anonymous -- a label that's been adopted before by activists who have electronically assaulted the Church of Scientology and the Australian government -- organized attacks on Web sites of companies that have distanced themselves from WikiLeaks. Distributed denial-of-service attacks enlist thousands of computers, all making simultaneous connections, in hopes of overwhelming a target.
Visa.com was taken offline briefly yesterday afternoon, though the company told CNET that no payments or transactions were affected. MasterCard.com was unreachable yesterday morning. A Web site for the Swedish prosecution agency, which is trying to extradite WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange on sexual assault allegations, has been targeted too.
Amazon.com was attacked today, but unlike Anonymous' other victims, it has a massive server infrastructure that can bring additional capacity online instantly. That famously robust system proved able to fend off what's being called Operation Payback.
"We have changed our target -- the Hive isn't big enough to attack Amazon," AnonOpsNet announced through Twitter. The new target: PayPal's Web-based system for processing payments.
It's unclear how successful those efforts were. A third-party monitoring service operated by WatchMouse.com reports that PayPal was experiencing significant problems in Japan, South Africa, and Germany, but not in the United States or most of Western Europe. The api.paypal.com Web site, however, was inaccessible from CNET's newsroom this afternoon.
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The Dutch National Prosecutors Office said that the teen, who was not named, was arrested by a high-tech crime team last night.
The arrest comes after a group known as Anonymous -- a label that's been adopted before by activists who have electronically assaulted the Church of Scientology and the Australian government -- organized attacks on Web sites of companies that have distanced themselves from WikiLeaks. Distributed denial-of-service attacks enlist thousands of computers, all making simultaneous connections, in hopes of overwhelming a target.
Visa.com was taken offline briefly yesterday afternoon, though the company told CNET that no payments or transactions were affected. MasterCard.com was unreachable yesterday morning. A Web site for the Swedish prosecution agency, which is trying to extradite WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange on sexual assault allegations, has been targeted too.
Amazon.com was attacked today, but unlike Anonymous' other victims, it has a massive server infrastructure that can bring additional capacity online instantly. That famously robust system proved able to fend off what's being called Operation Payback.
"We have changed our target -- the Hive isn't big enough to attack Amazon," AnonOpsNet announced through Twitter. The new target: PayPal's Web-based system for processing payments.
It's unclear how successful those efforts were. A third-party monitoring service operated by WatchMouse.com reports that PayPal was experiencing significant problems in Japan, South Africa, and Germany, but not in the United States or most of Western Europe. The api.paypal.com Web site, however, was inaccessible from CNET's newsroom this afternoon.
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