Operation: Payback, the Anonymous effort to conduct denial of service attacks against a wide range of targets has experienced something of a setback and is now changing course. Yesterday's arrest of a Dutch teenager has caused some difficulties for the group as well, as he was apparently the operator of an IRC server coordinating the attacks. The result: a change in course and what appears to be diminished enthusiasm on the part of 4chan denizens who make up the Anonymous collective.

This morning, Anonymous issued a press release in an attempt to explain its new position. The release states that Anonymous has no interest in compromising personal information or credit card details, but rather that its attacks on financial companies are motivated by a desire to draw attention to the way in which they are hurting WikiLeaks—taking "symbolic action" against the companies' "public faces." The announcement also recognizes that the group has not been doing a good job of explaining its motivation so far.

The authors of the press release also sought to distance themselves from calls made on Twitter yesterday to attack amazon.com—an attack that did not actually occur. A denial of service attack on Amazon was unlikely to succeed—the very reason that WikiLeaks itself used the company for its hosting for a brief period—but more than this, the writers say that such an attack would "affect people such as consumers in a negative way and make them feel threatened by Anonymous." As such, it would be counterproductive and "in bad taste."

Some Anonymous members have, therefore, suggested an alternative strategy: a crowdsourced effort to find juicy but so far unpublicised cables and promote them around the Web. Though this would certainly avoid the negative repercussions that denial of service attacks risk, and make promotion of WikiLeaks more apparent, it's not clear that such a plan has really inspired the hordes, or that it will be particularly successful—the cables are already widely circulated and examined, with the few interesting cables release so far already well publicized.

In the meantime, several of the Anonymous IRC servers are offline, with some "down for maintenance," which could very well indicate that the group is looking for new hosting. At the very least, they're experiencing serious DNS issues. There also seems to be little enthusiasm for the new approach on 4chan, as /b was utterly devoid of discussion on the new approach as of publication. Operation: Payback may very well be out of gas.