Today, British police said they arrested a 19-year-old man in connection with distributed denial of service attacks on, among other sites, the U.S. Senate and the CIA. Police said Ryan Clearly was linked to the hacker activist group LulzSec.
Investigators believe the arrest is significant and linked to the attacks based mainly at websites belonging to US institutions and organisations.
The operation involved two British forces as well as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI).
The police said they believed the attacks were linked and were carried out by the same group of hackers.
LulzSec is a group that operates in much the same way as its better known cousin Anonymous, which has been in the news lately because of its connection to the Sony Playstation hack that exposed the personal information of its customers.
LulzSec has come into the scene recently. Here's Wired with some history:
LulzSec won overnight attention when it cracked PBS last month to protest Frontline's hour-long documentary on WikiLeaks. In that hack, the group stole and posted thousands of stolen passwords, and put up a fake news story on a PBS Newshour blog.
The group has also claimed responsibility for hacking multiple Sony websites, and Fox.com, where the group stole and posted 363 employee passwords and the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed up for audition information for the upcoming Fox talent show The X-Factor. More recent hacks have included defacement of two regional websites for InfraGard — a kind of cybersecurity neighborhood watch sponsored by the FBI — and crude DDoS attacks against the CIA and other lulzkillers.
On June 19, LulzSec announced Operation Anti-Security, an all-out rebellion against all governments:
Top priority is to steal and leak any classified government information, including email spools and documentation. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking establishments. If they try to censor our progress, we will obliterate the censor with cannonfire anointed with lizard blood.
After British police announced the arrest of Clearly, they responded with :
Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it's all over now... wait... we're all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?
The group then said he was not a leader in LulzSec. Then, :
Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they've gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us. Lame.
Shortly after, in a releaseaddressed to the "FBI & other law enforcement clowns," they posted the personal information of two people they said "snitched" on them.
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDAxNDQ2NDAxMDEyNzU2NzM2ODA3ZGI1ZA001))
