Wisconsin man indicted in 2011 Anonymous hack of Koch Industries

A Wisconsin man could face years in federal prison if he is convicted of helping hacker collective Anonymous take down Koch Industries' website during protests in the state's capital in 2011, according to an indictment revealed this week.

The charges were announced Tuesday by the U.S. attorney's office in Wichita, Kan. -- the home of Koch Industries, a $115-billion-a-year oil and manufacturing conglomerate owned by libertarian iconoclasts Charles and David Koch.

Officials said Eric J. Rosol, 37, of Black Creek, Wis., participated in an Anonymous-organized shutdown of Koch websites www.kochind.com and www.quiltednorthern.com on Feb. 27 and 28 in 2011.

Rosol is the first and only defendant charged in the attack, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office told the Los Angeles Times.

The Koch site shutdown came during the height of pro-union protests in Wisconsin's state capital that winter, when the Koch brothers came under criticism for backing the state's union cutbacks. Under the hashtag #OpWisconsin, Anonymous members issued a statement accusing the Kochs of "political manipulation" and said, "We are actively seeking vulnerabilities."

In the world of computer crime, the attack was more of a mobbing than a robbery.

Using Internet-relay chats to organize, according to the indictment, Anonymous conducted what's known as a dedicated denial-of-service attack, or a DDOS, where users repeatedly access a website until it's too overwhelmed to function. (The physical equivalent would be a group of people standing in front of a door so closely that no one else can enter.)

more here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-anonymous-koch-hack-20130327,0,1118707.story