14 members of Anonymous hacker group were arrested Tuesday by the US authorities on charges they participated in several major cyber attacks on PayPal as vengeance for declining to process donations for WikiLeaks.

Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 14 people in 9 states and Washington D.C. for attacking PayPal last December. The attack is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Anonymous.

After WikiLeaks published thousands of embarrassing secret US diplomatic reports last year financial companies such as PayPal, MasterCard and Visa refused to work with the Julian Assange’s whistleblowing website.

The response of hackers was a DDoS attack on the websites of those firms.PayPal suffered attacks for several days last December.

The 14 individuals were charged with conspiracy, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison if convicted, and intentional damage to a protected computer, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The accused ranged in age from 20 to 42 and lived in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

"The fact that they have been tracked back and that some of them have been arrested is a significant development," said Mark Rasch, a former chief of the Justice Department's cyber crimes unit and now director of Cybersecurity and Privacy Consulting for the government technology services firm CSC.