Someone has been arrested for using LOIC

Probably LOIC is not so safe as it was supposed to be.

Yesterday FOX News (curiously the American province of the Murdoch Empire which had suffered an hacking attack by the Lulz Boat the day before) was the first to report of three FBI Raids at the New York homes of three suspected members of notorious hacking group Anonymous early Tuesday morning. Later on the same day more details came clear, including the fact that the raids were part of a wider ongoinhg operation involving, to date, more than 35 search warrants issued by FBI (for a total of 75 searches to date), after which sixteen suspected members of Anonymous were arrested in Florida, New Jersey and California (more details in the official FBI press release including the names of the arrested individuals).

The arrested individuals were considered responsable for the DDoS attacks against Visa, Mastercards, PayPal and more, after the companies decided to suspend donations for WikiLeaks.

In the same hours, again according to Fox News, officers from the Metropolitan Police’s E-Crime Unit in London arrested a 16-year-old boy in South London Tuesday afternoon, on suspicion of breaching the Computer Misuse Act. The suspected individual could be Tflow, a key member of the infamous hacker group LulzSec, and he has beeen charged of the Infragard hacking, an affiliate to FBI, on June, the 3rd 2011.

This is not the first example of raid against alleged Anonymous members since similar police actions were performed a couple of weeks ago in Italy and Switzerland leading to the arrest of 15 individuals, and also in similar in Spain last month, which saw another three suspects arrested.

If we exclude the arrest of the alleged Lulzsec member, as I already suggested, probably in many cases the alleged Anonymous members are “Would-be” hacker, recklessly involved in hactivism campaigns on the wave of enthusiasm butwithout the necessary skills. This explains the low average age of the teens purportedly involved. As a confirm I found this interesting post on ReddIt in which a family man tells, triggering the predictable comments from taxpayers, of an FBI in his house with a search warrant (20 agents, guns drawn) because they seemed to believe his 13 year old son was an integral part of the ANON ddos attack on Paypal (I must confess that for an European grown with Sci-Fi U.S. Movies like I am, the imagine of 4 cars and a black van filled with FBI agents invading a common house is priceless). It looks like this is not the only example.