A hacker purported to have been involved in the December 2011 cyberattacks on private intelligence firm Stratfor was arrested late Monday evening in Chicago. The hacker was one of six members of hacktivist group Anonymous charged with “computer hacking and other crimes,” the FBI said Tuesday.

Chicago native Jeremy Hammond — a member of Anonymous splinter-group Antisec — was arrested by the FBI late Monday evening as part of a greater sting on the leadership of Anonymous, a group once thought to be leaderless.

Hammond and several of his co-conspirators were implicated in being involved in the December 2011 attack on private intelligence firm Stratfor. The international sting comes one week after the publication of Stafor’s private email correspondence — which was obtained through the cyberattack — by WikiLeaks and its various international media partners.

Hammond (“Anarchaos”), a 27 year old from Chicago, Ill. was the only other American charged in the case. New York native Hector Xavier Monsegur (“Sabu”) — a 28-year-old alleged kingpin of the group — plead guilty in August 2011 to the charges he faced and cooperated with federal officials in exchange for leniency. Monsegur is an unemployed father of two.

“It was because of his kids,” one of the agents who had first encountered Monsegur face-to-face told Fox. “He’d do anything for his kids. He didn’t want to go away to prison and leave them. That’s how we got him.”

Monsegur faces a maximum of 124 years and six months in prison, according to an official FBI statement.

In addition to the Americans charged Tuesday, several of the members — all of whom identified themselves as members of Anonymous, Internet Feds and/or LulzSec — were from the U.K. and Ireland.  Ryan Ackroyd (“Kayla”), Jake Davis (“Topiary”), Darren Martyn (“Pwnsauce”) and Donncha O’Cearrbhail (“Palladium”) were charged.

UPDATE: Stratfor told The Daily Caller in an official statement that it “applauds the hard work of the law enforcement organizations involved in the investigation. As the matter now moves through the judicial system, we will stay focused on working to recover from the episode.”

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Members of Anonymous regularly band together to take down websites owned by those they don’t like, but security firm Symantec reports that a recent attack could actually have backfired, putting amateur hacktavists’ bank accounts at risk.

Anonymous uses tools such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon or Slowloris to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against its targets, with sympathetic Anons downloading the software to become part of a voluntary botnet.

Full Story: Anonymous members tricked into giving up bank details

Hacker group Anonymous strongly rejected suggestions on Tuesday that followers could cause a power outage by staging a cyberattack on an electricity grid.

The Anonymous statement came after The Wall Street Journal quoted the head of the US National Security Agency (NSA) as warning that hackers could have the ability within the next year or two to cause a limited power outage.

The newspaper said General Keith Alexander has not publicly expressed such a concern about the power grid but has provided his assessment in meetings at the White House and in other private sessions.

Full Story: Anonymous says power grid not a target

Anonymous, in a retaliatory assault against the December eviction of their Occupy cohorts in downtown Boston, hacked the Boston Police Department website Friday. A recent report says that another wave of online attacks may be on the way this coming Friday.

The Boston Police Department said that their site is still down after the hacktivists first defaced the page four days ago, the Boston Herald reported Wednesday. The police department began to divert web traffic to its Facebook page, and a local group stated that many people in the community depend on the department’s web page for local news.

Anonymous, a seemingly amorphous collection of politically motivated hackers from around the globe, has gained notoriety over the past couple of years for its campaigns against groups like the Church of Scientology, Middle Eastern governments, U.S. defense contractors and government agencies, banks and electronics companies. The group also threw its weight behind the Occupy movement in the Fall of 2011.

Former Anonymous member Greg Housh, in an interview with the Boston Herald, said that anyone with knowledge of a site vulnerability can get on an Anonymous chat and rally support for an assault on an item on their target list.

“It could just be one single person out there who has never even done anything with Anonymous saying, ‘You should hit this.’ … All of the major attacks followed some form of injustice in their eye, and boom, they go after them,” said Housh.

As of 10am EST Wednesday, the Boston Police Department’s site appeared fully operational.

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Political hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have found emails linking Texas Rep. Ron Paul to an American white supremacist group, a claim the Paul campaign says is completely untrue.

Las Vegas-based group American Third Party Position (AP3) — whose stated goal is “to reach out to Americans of European ancestry and particularly to disenfranchised White workers, farmers and students who have become victims of the discriminatory affirmative action policies” — was allegedly hacked by Anonymous Tuesday, and emails purportedly reveal close ties between Paul and members who are admitted white supremacists.

The alleged emails show that James Kelso, a former member of the John Birch Society, was just one of several members of the group that regularly met with Paul.

“In addition to finding the usual racist rants and interactions with other white power groups, we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul,” said Anonymous in a statement.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.”

When asked by The Daily Caller if the allegations were true, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign denied any ties to AP3.

“This stuff is completely false, and a waste of time,” said Paul spokesman Gary Howard.

A3P did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment by the time of publication.

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Political hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have found emails linking Texas Rep. Ron Paul to an American white supremacist group, a claim the Paul campaign says is completely untrue.

Las Vegas-based group American Third Party Position (AP3) — whose stated goal is “to reach out to Americans of European ancestry and particularly to disenfranchised White workers, farmers and students who have become victims of the discriminatory affirmative action policies” — was allegedly hacked by Anonymous Tuesday, and emails purportedly reveal close ties between Paul and members who are admitted white supremacists.

The alleged emails show that James Kelso, a former member of the John Birch Society, was just one of several members of the group that regularly met with Paul.

“In addition to finding the usual racist rants and interactions with other white power groups, we also found a disturbingly high amount of members who are also involved in campaigning for Ron Paul,” said Anonymous in a statement.

“According to these messages, Ron Paul has regularly met with many A3P members, even engaging in conference calls with their board of directors.”

When asked by The Daily Caller if the allegations were true, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign denied any ties to AP3.

“This stuff is completely false, and a waste of time,” said Paul spokesman Gary Howard.

A3P did not respond to TheDC’s request for comment by the time of publication.

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The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) specializes in knock-outs. Recently, the UFC found itself fighting an invisible foe in an Internet cage-fight over its support for the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, contentious anti-piracy bills.

Numerous accounts on Twitter, allegedly associated with Anonymous — a leaderless group of politically motivated hackers purporting to fight for worldwide Internet freedom, attacked UFC President Dana White last week for his company’s support of the bills and for making what they deemed “too much money.”

The bills, which would have given the Justice Department the authority to obtain a court order to block foreign website domain names found to be facilitating the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, attracted online protests that sucked the wind out of the sails of supporters.

White, with an estimated net worth of over $ 150 million, has on numerous occasions donated to charitable causes straight out of his own pocket.  He fired back: “who the fuck are u to tell me what I should have and shouldn’t have!? U guys talk about freedom and BS but think I have to much $ ?”

White told his assailants that he did not know who they (Anonymous) were and was only concerned about dealing with the piracy that affected his business. He even agreed with the hackers that the bill wasn’t perfect, yet the barrage continued. When White called them “terrorists,” “cowards” and challenged them to attack him, the hackers were only too happy to oblige.

The charge was led by Anonymous-affiliated accounts that claimed to have posted White’s personal information –including his phone number, Social Security number and mailing address — on the programmer site Pastebin.

White later denied via Twitter that it was his personal information the hackers posted, but rather information belonging to other people, including the leaked information of Las Vegas woman Julie Breeler, who was bombarded over the weekend with phone calls from people who saw the information posted online.

“We’re all for free speech and the marketplace of ideas,” Ike Lawrence Epstein, executive vice president and general counsel for the UFC, told The Daily Caller. “I think it says a lot about these people when all they want to do is hurt somebody. It’s completely inconsistent with the values that these guys are trying to espouse.”

“I can’t tell you the groundswell of support we’ve received, and a lot of it has been coming from people who had issues with SOPA and PIPA,” Epstein told TheDC. “All we’re trying to do is advocate for legislation to be changed.”

This was not, however, the mixed martial arts organization’s first round with hackers and online pirates. In fact, the assault on White was only the latest in a long string of attacks from hackers on UFC, a company that developed a business model highly dependent on corporate sponsorships, event ticket sales and pay-per-view buys.

Epstein told TheDC that over four years ago the UFC started to notice a significant problem with taped events and archived material showing up on sites like YouTube and DailyMotion. Three years ago, the company saw the advent of live streams of its pay-per-view events.

“The value of our content is higher when it’s live, and it was something that scared us,” said Epstein. Pay-per-view buys are where the UFC makes “the lion’s share of its revenues.”

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Following a major Thursday evening cyber-assault by hacktivist collective Anonymous, the Justice Department’s website was taken offline. The site crashed yet again Friday afternoon.

The Justice Department was targeted in retaliation for its takedown of the popular file-sharing franchise MegaUpload, which was registered in Hong Kong.

The DOJ action, and the hacker group’s reaction, came one day after the Internet-wide SOPA “Blackout Day.”

SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, and its sister bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, faced criticism from lawmakers and organizations on all sides of the political spectrum who believed that the bills were too broad and threatened free speech.

Anonymous modified its signature tactic — the DDOS, or distributive denial of service — to take down sites for the entertainment industry, the Justice Department and the FBI. Group members usually participate in an attack voluntarily, overloading a target website’s servers with high volumes of traffic. But last night’s attack was different.

The group weaponized Twitter by distributing a link that would ensnare a user’s computer into the attack by involuntarily uploading software on the computer that would then redirect it to the target site and repeatedly call the site’s servers. When enough computers focused in on a site, the servers would crash.

The link, according to Gawker, spread at a rate of four times a minute, or every 15 seconds. DDOS attacks are considered illegal.

Anonymous, a leaderless group, in December declared war on members of Congress and industry associations supporting the bills. The group is no stranger to targeting governments, regimes and corporations it believes to be oppressive.

The DOJ was unavailable for comment at the time of publication. It is unknown whether Friday’s outage was caused by a follow-up attack or an additional server failure. As of 4 p.m. EST, Justice.gov was restored.

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Aaron Barr, a cyber security analyst for federal contractor Sayers and Associates, was recently fired from his latest job for “spending too much time” on his pursuit of Anonymous.

The Huffington Post reported Friday that Barr’s former employer fired Barr for “acting like a “cowboy” on the company dime.” Barr has been involved in numerous programs throughout his career in the security industry, several of which involved his pursuit of hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Barr was the former CEO of security firm HBGary Federal who claimed to have infiltrated the ranks of Anonymous in early 2011 and planned to reveal the “leaders” of the group, despite the fact that Anonymous claims to have no leaders. Anonymous retaliated with the release of thousands of internal emails that linked HBGary Federal to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Barrett Brown – founder of Project PM, a crowdsourced investigation focused on research and analysis of the intelligence contracting industry – alerted The Daily Caller to Barr’s firing late Friday afternoon. Brown is often associated as the public “face” of Anonymous, although he specifically does not speak for the group due to the structure and nature of Anonymous.

Brown told TheDC, “He was fired from his latest job for spending too much time going after Anonymous and presumably me. We suspected he was still up to something — when I met him in NYC, he was with the CEO of Provide Security, which vandalized our wiki when we put up a page on them.”

A wiki is a website which enables users to easily edit content via a web browser. An online associate of Thomas Ryan, a managing partner at Provide Security, by the name of ShadowDXS, was behind the wiki vandilization, Brown told TheDC:

“Thomas Ryan’s online associate did the vandalizing. The fellow, ShadowDXS, was a former Project PM participant who turned on us after Lulzsec fucked with him (no one really liked him).”

Lulzsec was a splinter group of Anonymous that hacked for the “lulz,” or laughs, not financial gain. Lulzsec is a part of a broader “anti-sec” movement, which is opposed to the computer security industry.

“His problem, like that of a lot of people who are after me, is that they can’t accept a loss, emotionally,” said Brown. “They have to feel triumph.”

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SOPA and PIPA may be in zombie mode, having burned up in the fire of SOPA “Blackout Day” protests and the largest attack by Anonymous on record, but activists who opposed the legislation understand that the Internet wars have only just begun.

Barrett Brown, often recognized as a public face of Anonymous, announced that his own group, Project PM, will be keeping an eye on Democratic congressmen who hope to “quietly support” the legislation.

“Yesterday my ProjectPM group began preparations for a campaign to go after any Democratic congressmen who hope to quietly support SOPA without drawing any negative attention that might damage their cred among liberals,” Brown told the Daily Caller in an email.

While Republicans evacuated their support of SOPA and PIPA — the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and the Protect IP Act in the Senate — en masse Wednesday and Thursday after constituents flooded their offices with calls and emails, only a few Democrats did the same.

The bills were promoted as bipartisan legislation, but the top five beneficiaries of campaign donations from supporters of SOPA and PIPA — amounting to a sum of over $ 1 million — were all Democrats.

The Daily Caller previously reported that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who until Friday had planned on introducing PIPA to the Senate floor as a “jobs bill,” received over $ 3.5 million dollars in campaign donations.

“OpDonkeyPunch is currently in information-gathering phase, ” Brown told The Daily Caller, “we had intended to begin work tonight, but the change in situation now needs to be assessed. This will give us time to decide who is most vulnerable to a series of targeted propaganda campaigns of the sort that will bring attention to themselves and their donors, among other things.”

“OpDonkeyPunch” was first reported during the “OpMegaUpload” firestorm Thursday by RT.com.

The Democratic Party has often been the financial and intellectual beneficiary of Hollywood glamour; President Barack Obama’s own presidential campaigns benefit from the pockets of movie stars. When the Democratic-led Federal Communications Commission voted to pass so-called “net neutrality” regulations, which placed Internet service providers at the whim of government regulators, it was the Democrats who upheld the regulation against a Republican-led effort to overrule the regulation and bring “net neutrality” into the congressional forum for debate.

Former Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, who was named chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America in March 2011, said in a statement on the MPAA blog (where readers can also download a hi-res photo of Dodd)  that the MPAA hopes “the dynamics of the conversation can change and become a sincere discussion about how best to protect the millions of American jobs affected by the theft of American intellectual property.”

The bills in their current incarnation were declared dead on Friday following announcements by Reid and SOPA’s sponsor, Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith. When asked by The Daily Caller whether or not Anonymous would strike back again should another so-called piracy bill come down the pipe, Brown responded:

“I’m not  yet sure what Anonymous will do when this comes back on the table — that will depend on the new form that SOPA and PIPA take, but it will certainly involve more DDOS attacks, at the very least.”

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