The defendants — who admitted to participating in an Anonymous-led operation that momentarily took PayPal.com offline in late 2010 — entered guilty pleas before a judge in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California early Thursday and will be formally sentenced in one year.
Eleven of the so-called “PayPal 14” members each pleaded guilty in court to one felony count of conspiracy and one misdemeanor count of damaging a computer as a result of their involvement in a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack waged by Anonymous in late 2010 shortly after PayPal stopped processing donations to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks. Prosecutors say the defendants used a free computer program called the Low Ion Orbit Cannon, or LOIC, to collectively flood PayPal’s servers with tremendous amounts of illegitimate internet traffic for one week that winter, at moments knocking the website offline as a result and causing what PayPal estimated to be roughly $5.5 million in damages.
WikiLeaks had started to release a trove of classified US State Department diplomatic cables that November, prompting PayPal to revoke the whistleblowing group’s account due to an alleged terms-of-service violation. On their part, WikiLeaks claims PayPal installed the equivalent of an illegal financial blockade by refusing to process contributions. Combined with similar actions taken by Visa and Mastercard at the time, the transparency organization said the blockade cost an estimated $250 million in losses in the years since.
