Arrests In US And UK After PayPal Is Hacked

A 16-year-old boy is being held on suspicion of cyber-crime in Britain as FBI agents made a string of arrests in the US over an attack on the PayPal website.

They are suspected of being members of the secretive activist group Anonymous, which is thought to have targeted PayPal because it suspended the accounts of WikiLeaks.

The British teenager was arrested at an address in south London.

Scotland Yard is working with the FBI - which made 14 arrests in raids on homes across America - and police in the Netherlands, where arrests have also been made.

Other alleged members of Anonymous have been traced to several other countries, including Spain, Switzerland and Turkey.

The group is said to be sympathetic to WikiLeaks, the website which controversially released thousands of classified US State Department documents in November.

The group also claims responsibility for disrupting the websites of Visa and MasterCard in December when the credit card companies stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Court papers show that Anonymous referred to the cyber-attacks on PayPal as Operation Avenge Assange.

A common illegal hacking method used by the group has been a "distributed denial of service" attack, where websites are bombarded with requests for information and become overwhelmed.

The same method has been used by hacking group LulzSec, whose most recent target was The Sun's website, which it took control of on Monday evening.

Like LulzSec, Anonymous has been blamed for attacks on Sony - the PlayStation manufacturer said in May the group had allowed the personal data of more than 100 million video game users to be accessed.