Anonymous: Student charged over web attacks

Police investigating the hacking group Anonymous have charged a 22-year-old student from Hartlepool with computer crime. Peter David Gibson was arrested by the Metropolitan Police's e-Crime Unit. He is accused of trying to hinder the operation of, or access to, a computer system. UK detectives, along with their international counterparts have been investigating a series of denial of service attacks on major websites. The hacker "collective" Anonymous has been implicated in number of online protests targeting eBay, Visa, PayPal and others. Its tactics typically involved flooding the companies' websites with multiple requests from remotely controlled networks of computers known as botnets. Mr Gibson is due in court on 7 September.