The FBI raided several homes in New York this morning, executing search warrants on individuals believed to be involved in cyber attacks perpetrated by hacker group Anonymous.
Fox News reported that agents showed up at homes in Baldwin, Long Island, and Brooklyn. The suspected hackers are in their late teens and early 20s, the Web site said.
CBS News also confirmed the raids; officials removed computers and other accessories but made no arrests.
The FBI is reportedly investigating attacks on companies that cut ties with WikiLeaks last year. After the site released 250,000 State Department cables, Visa, MasterCard, Amazon, and PayPal all stopped doing business with WikiLeaks, prompting Anonymous to coordinate several distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the companies' Web sites.
In recent months, officials in Turkey, Spain, and the UK have arrested several people for their roles in hacks carried out by Anonymous and related group LulzSec.
In late June, there were also reports that the FBI raided the home of an Iowa woman with connections to Anonymous and LulzSec, but the groups said that story was a fake.
As Sophos pointed out, a DDoS attack is punishable in the U.S. by up to 10 years in prison and considerable fines.
A joint Anonymous-LulzSec operation known as "Operation Anti-Security," or AntiSec has targeted FBI-affiliated Web sites recently, including IT contractor IRC Federal.
The main Anonymous and LulzSec Twitter feeds did not immediately address the raids, but a Thai offshoot of Anonymous tweeted that "It doesnt matter how many people the 'FBI' arrest.. wether they are core members or not.. #anonymous have started something unstoppable."
@AnonNewsNet later tweeted that there are "FBI vannings reported in #NY and #CA in connection with #Anonymous ... Previous raids focused on those running IRC servers."
LulzSec, meanwhile, came out of retirement this week and focused its attention on News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch. In response to the phone-hacking scandal, LulzSec hacked The Sun newspaper Web site yesterday, and members claim to be sitting on emails from that paper and the now-defunct News of the World.
Update: On Tuesday night, the Department of Justice confirmed the arrest of 16 alleged hackers charged with cyberattacks on PayPal, FBI affiliate Infragard, and AT&T in sweeping action against alleged Anonymous members.