Northampton University student Christopher Weatherhead, 22, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for what Southwark Crown Court heard was his key role as a “high-level operator” in Anonymous. He helped organise the self-styled "Operation Payback" attacks through online chat rooms, prosecutors said.
Ashley Rhodes, 28, of Camberwell, was jailed for seven months, and Peter Gibson, 24, of Hartlepool, for six months. A fourth defendant, Jake Birchall, from Chester, was 16 at the time of the offences and will be sentenced later.
Anonymous, an international collective of internet “hacktivists” who claim to have no formal leadership, attacked online services including PayPal, Visa and Mastercard in 2010 after they stopped processing donations destined for Wikileaks. The whistle blowing website was under pressure after it released tens of thousands of classified United States Government documents.
Anonymous attacked the financial services firms after initially targeting entertainment industry organisations such as BPI, a record label trade group, over their role in anti-internet piracy initiatives.
During the trial, PayPal told the court the distributed denial of service attacks, which sought to force it offline by overloading servers, had cost it £3.5m, with “considerable damage to its reputation and loss of trade”.
The court heard that Weatherhead, who denied a charge of conspiracy to impair the operation of computers, had "played a central and integral role in the overall effectiveness" of the attacks under the online alias “Nerdo”.
In mitigation his barrister said he had acted out of “youthful idealism and zeal” and urged the judge not to impose a prison sentence because his “nerdiness” would make him a target for other inmates. The other men all pleaded guilty.
Sentencing, Judge Peter Testar said: “The defendants were actually rather arrogant.
“They thought they were far too clever to be caught and used various methods to try to cloak and preserve their anonymity. It seems to me that the police were a little bit more clever than the conspirators."
