PayPal faced a bill of £3.5 million to counter hacking from the Anonymous group. A Northampton University student was up in the dock for his part in the attack which was aimed at credit card companies but added PayPal as a target when they ceased processing payments on behalf of Wikileaks in 2010.
The defendant was one of just 6,000 hackers based in the UK out of almost 30,000 in total who were targeting PayPal. According to the Telegraph “104 employees from eBay, the parent company of PayPal, were employed to work on issues directly related to the attack for three weeks afterwards” as well as deploying new hardware and software to ensure another similar attack could be protected against in the future.
The case will continue at Southwark Crown Court, but in the mean time the BBC ran a great video from the inside of PayPal’s Network Operations Centre soon after the hack, giving a rare insight into what it takes to keep the world’s biggest online payment processor running.
One Response
Is this not just a case of their security laxing though – they should have spent this money years ago of sorting their systems out. The Anon attack just brought to light how shoddy their systems had been.