Anonymous, said to be a loosely-gathered federation of hackers, has been believed to be behind a wide variety of recent hackings. One of the more recent took place in an attack on the Salt Lake City Police Department as well as the Utah Chiefs of Police Associations' web sites, and one arrest has been made in connection with that, according to a federal indictment unsealed today.

John Anthony Borell III, 21, a resident of Toledo, Ohio, is set to be arraigned in a federal court on two counts of computer intrusion. The counts, according to court records, happened almost two weeks apart, with the attack on the Utah Chiefs of Police Association happening on January 19, followed by the attack on the Salt Lake City Police Department's site happening on January 31. Both attacks were said to cause over $5,000 in damage, and as a result, Borell faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, per charge. Some estimates suggest that the Utah Chiefs of Police Association spent as much as $150,000 to mitigate Borell's alleged assault.

Borell was arrested March 20, after police tracked him down through his Internet address, though since Borell took credit for the hackings via Twitter (News - Alert), he likely made the tracking quite a bit easier. The Anonymous connection, meanwhile, is somewhat tenuous; Anonymous is loosely organized at best, so most anyone can say that they're a member of the Anonymous collective, and since Anonymous holds little in the way of meetings and keeps less in the way of records, actually verifying that Borell is an Anonymous member is largely impossible.

But with the memory of the PlayStation Network hackings fresh in everyone's mind, as well as the variety of other hackings that took place last year from groups like Lulzsec and the like, evoking the Anonymous connection is a powerful move on prosecutors' part. Prosecutors will likely be looking for a bit of an edge in terms of a jury trial, should it go that far, and pulling out the Anonymous connection should serve as a substantial push in that direction.