On Thursday, police arrested and raided the homes of five people in connection with Distributed Denial of Service cyberactions against Visa, Mastercard, Paypal and Amazon. These had been organised as solidarity actions in relation to attacks on Wikileaks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/27/anonymous-hacking

Those arrested are assumed to be associated with broadband connections and their corresponding IP addresses which were logged by the servers targeted in the DDoS attacks. Sadly, due to the nature of cyber crime, it is highly likely that innocent people may find themselves arrested. Before the raids the police are unlikely to have had any evidence connecting a specific person or computer to the use of the traced connections. They will be hoping to find evidence on computers seized during or after arrest or to obtain some kind of 'admission' by those arrested during interview.

REMEMBER - The best legal advice anyone could offer to those concerned is never to use a duty solicitor and to give a NO COMMENT interview. When released, seek advice from an experienced solicitor. You have nothing to gain from talking to the police and everything to lose!

People who have open or WEP protected wifi access points at home should be aware that anyone could have used their internet connection to launch a cyber attack. The IP addresses logged would then be traced back to the registered account holder of the broadband service. Obviously that would be a defence against any charges, but that is not much consolation when the police have raided your home at dawn, arrested you and seized your computer.

SECURITY ADVICE

If you run Windows, be aware that it is a very insecure operating system and wide open to exploits that may allow people to access your computer remotely without your knowledge. Some hackers have access to a network of tens of thousands of exploited windows computers. These 'BotNets' can be instructed to launch cyber attacks like those carried out in solidarity with Wikileaks. If your computer was used in this way you could be arrested, and it would be difficult to prove your innocence.

You would be well advised to stop using Windows and use a Linux based operating system, such as Ubuntu, instead. At the very least, if you think your computer may have been compromised by a remote user, you should back up all your important data then completely reformat your hard disk drive and reinstall your operating system. It is good practice to use up-to-date virus and spyware protection software.

During raids on properties, the police are likely to confiscate all computers they find. They have the power to keep these for up to two years. Theoretically, if the property is shared, the police should only search the bedroom of the person they have arrested and should only seize evidence from his or her room. It is possible, however, that the search warrants in these particular cases may relate to the entire premises stated on the broadband ISP contract, so anyone living there with a computer would be at risk.

If you are concerned about friends, please be aware that advising them to destroy their browser history and remove hacking tools etc from their computer may be considered an "attempt to pervert the course of justice", which is a criminal offence. Always remember that email, text messages, Facebook, Twitter etc are NOT safe places to talk about anything! Of course, if you are concerned about their privacy and security in general, there is nothing wrong with giving them tech advice and assistance.

If you would rather not have the police looking through your private documents then you should clean up your computer now. Be aware that the delete function does not actually remove data from the hard drive. You will need to install some form of secure erase software and make sure you also do a secure wipe on so-called 'unused space' which may also contain fragments of your old confidential files.

To protect your privacy you should ideally encrypt your entire home directory and when browsing the web make sure you use the private browsing function, available in Firefox, so that you do not record a history of your browsing habits.

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For more information about computer security please see the Tech Tools for Activists book.

For essential information on being arrested please read "Everything you need to know about being arrested".

For general information about your rights, please visit the GBC legal briefings page on our website.