PayPal hands over 1,000 Anonymous IP addresses to the FBI

Remember last year when PayPal was attacked by Anonymous after it froze Wikileaks’ account? Well, it looks like PayPal has finally decided to strike back against the hacking coalition. Apparently the hackers left behind enough information to be traceable. PayPal has reported that it has given a list of over 1,000 IP addresses to the FBI: IP addresses that were linked to the PayPal attack last year.

As of now, there’s no telling how useful the list of IP addresses are though. Because the attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS), the IP addresses might prove to be worthless. DDoS attacks are usually performed by zombie computer systems: systems that have been infected by Trojans that its owner has no knowledge of.

And even if the IP addresses weren’t from zombie computer systems, they might be fake or spoofed addresses, since it’s pretty much a pre-requisite for hackers to mask their addresses before performing ant attacks. Not masking their IP addresses would pretty much be an invitation to get caught.

We’re not sure why PayPal waited this long to release the information, but we’re guessing that the recent boycotting movement started by LulzSec and Anonymous might have spurred the company to do so. Stay tuned for more updates.

George Wong
Categories: Web
Tags: anonymous, Hacking, internet, paypal, Security