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FOUR MEMBERS OF the LulzSec international hacking collective were sentenced to prison terms in Britain today for masterminding cyber atacks on major global institutions, including Sony Pictures and the CIA.
Ryan Cleary, 21, Jake Davis, 20, Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, and Ryan Ackroyd, 26, saw themselves as “latter-day pirates” when they carried out the attacks on organisations which also included Rupert Murdoch’s top-selling British newspaper The Sun.
Cleary was jailed for 32 months, Ackroyd for 30 months and Davis for two years, while Al-Bassam was given a 20-month suspended sentence.
All four had admitted offences under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act.
The group were “hacktivists” with the LulzSec collective behind attacks that stole sensitive personal data such as emails, online passwords and credit card details.
LulzSec, an offshoot of the larger group Anonymous, existed from February to July 2011 and built up a huge international following, reaching 355,000 Twitter followers within two months.
They used social media and leaked details of attacks to journalists to further their quest of publicity, mainly through their chief publicist Davis.
The international group’s most high profile attack involved the extensive breach of Sony Pictures’ computer systems, which led to the personal data of thousands of Sony customers being posted online.
Sony lost details relating to 26.4 million customers in the attack which cost it €15 million, the court heard.
In June 2011 LulzSec took down the CIA.gov website in an attack masterminded by Al-Bassam, and the following month visitors to The Sun’s website were redirected to a spoof story about Murdoch committing suicide.
A photo of The Sun website after it was targeted by the hackers. (Yui Mok/PA Wire)
Britain’s National Health Service and Serious Organised Crime Agency were also victims of the group, who lived as far apart as London and the Shetland Islands, Britain’s most northerly outpost, and never met in person.
Stolen information was posted unencrypted on their website and file-sharing sites like Pirate Bay in 2011, the court had previously heard.
They also carried out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, using linked networks of up to one million computers to overpower and crash websites.
The group’s activity collectively cost their targets millions of dollars and potentially left millions of people at risk from criminals.
“Serious criminal offences”
Andrew Hadik, lawyer for the Crown Prosecution Service, said the group’s actions had been “cowardly and vindictive”.
“Co-ordinating and carrying out these attacks from the safety of their own bedrooms may have made the group feel detached from the consequences of their actions,” he said.
They were in fact committing serious criminal offences for which they have been successfully prosecuted.
Sentencing the men at Southwark Crown Court in London, judge Deborah Taylor said some of their taunting of their victims made “chilling reading”.
“You cared nothing for the privacy of others but did everything you could through your computer activities to hide your own identities while seeking publicity,” she said.
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Remind me again how many of Murdoch newspaper phone hackers have been jailed so far?
I don’t for the life of me see how these people could be considered ‘heroes’, just because they launched a few DDoS attacks on websites associated to government or big business. They allowed criminals to get sensitive information on millions of ordinary people who could still be potentially defrauded.
I’m not sure that many people do call them heroes.
They got a lot of twitter followers not necessarily because people supported what they were doing but because they probably just wanted to see what they would do next.
LulzSec and Anonymous probably should be mentioned in the same sentence only if it’s made a bit more clear about the relationship there. That relationship is more about Anonymous developing into a more socially aware (for want of a better term) collective which annoyed some of those who would be more interested in chaos. LulzSec had some level of distaste for the “white knight” attitude and went out to actively hit on targets in a way that did more than try to make a point.
I missed my playstation for those few months…
Tony hits the nail on the head
Ok, who’s brave enough to say something about them online. Not me…. as you were boys!!!!
What, they’ll DoS your broadband? The guys got caught because they’re amateurs with egos. If they were any good they’d have covered their tracks well enough to not get caught.
Anonymous is not a hacking collective
That makes it better?
@YourAnonNews
YAN is the antithesis of anonymous!
Hanging out to dry, motto of the game in the crack down on hactivists.
Far as I know there’s no proof lulsec were responsible for the attack against Sony that exposed customers details (they did exploit them but was minor and not related) this is after Sony hired two security firms to investigate and no links were found…
What about their attack on Westboro Baptist Church? or support of wikileaks and many other attacks against agency’s and company’s that have zero respect for our privacy or rights?
There’s a bigger story here, this article has no insight.
The bigger story is quite easy to find however mainstream media will never report it.
Well it’s better than Guantanamo , or being made walk the plank… Lulzzzzz
Anyone called Mustafa is guilty.
I’m safe so, I don’t download it, just stream it off sites!
No fap folder, no crime.
everything you see on your screen is in effect downloaded to your PC. even this site.
just because you cant see a folder with files you recognise as such doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and there’s always the IP history which can be checked at any time,
but, yeah, as long as the pages you visit do not contain illegal material you have nothing to be afraid of.
Just make sure you have the latest bang-up-to-date patches on your Windows platform, and regularly run virus checks and keep that updated regularly – then you should all be good.
You can view sites, even if the materials are questionable, read, illegal, provided and this is the twist, if you download the content, then that’s asking for it basically.
ISP’s do monitor and sniff out traffic hitting on their servers before the site’s data reaches your computer…. just saying :)
Practice safe hex! :)
For those not in the know, hex is base 16 set of numbers and alphas
Tom, you obviously misunderstand how the web works. If you view something, it has been downloaded.
Safe hex? Wtf? What ha hex got todo with it?
And while updated OS and AV is good practice, don’t think that’s enough to keep safe online. Signature based detection hasn’t been effective for years.
ISP’s can’t easily snoop your https traffic, not at all if the server requires client certificates.
Barry – you’ve mis-read what I wrote – “ISP’s do monitor and sniff out traffic hitting on their servers before the site’s data reaches your computer” read that sentence again…
Safe hex is a play on the word safe sex…. hexadecimal is base 16 which computers understands, apart from octal and binary….
I know what hex is. I just didn’t know why you were referencing. Didn’t get the joke.
I did read it properly. I pointed out that with https the ISP can just see a TCP packet with an encrypted payload so really the only useful information is the source and destination IP/domain.
Oh, and btw, I’m being pedantic now but a computer no more understands base16 than it does base10 or base64. Computers work with binary. Hexadecimal, being 2^4, is just a more convenient way of representing binary than decimal.
NERD get a life
Jeff, luckily some people aren’t afraid of knowledge like you are or else we’d still be still in the Stone Age. Durrrrrr
Go to sleep and dream about calculators. Your trying too hard to look intelligent
Seriously? That’s the best you can do? Dream about calculators?
Whatever about me trying to look intelligent, you certainly aren’t trying. (Although I shouldn’t be surprised if you are trying but calculators is the biggest word you could think of).
Barrys on a power trip to look smart
@Tom – as soon as you visit a site it’s downloaded to your cache
In fairness, it’s not overly difficult to make everything you’ve looked at online disappear locally. Don’t even need to be particularly computer savvy. Nor is it particularly difficult to cover your tracks online. The fact these lads got caught shows they were overly arrogant in their activities.
Windows ?
What about all women that watch porn ? Should they be locked up as well
This article is making me feel out of touch. I’m lying, it’s making me feel old. Who is willing to admit that they can’t keep up with modern lingo?. Me, that’s who. A strange crossroads has been reached. An indigenous English speaking person now needs a translator, to translate the hybrid English/ computer language. Save yourselves, leave me behind, all I ask is that you leave me a bullet in the chamber for me.
Do a course! You’d be amazed what’s floating around in air these days. It’s a whole other world.
This one is fun:
Good. Smart kids doing stupid things.
For their acts of pure stupidity and self-ego massaging boosts – so called “h4c|<3r5 0f 7h3 \/\/0r1d un173" – pffftttt!!!
One word – LULZ!!
Tom Brennan i5 l33t.
*bow5*
#includeint main(int argc,char **argv){ while(1){printf(“First rule of hacking is you do not talk about it!\nSecond rule, refer to first rule!\n”);}return 0;}
Meh! Comment box filtered out the < and > so that should have read #include<stdio.h>
le sigh! :D
Cheers Seán!
Hello /b/rothers.
I see you’re new here Sergé. May I refer you to Rule 1.
Am I reading between the lines correctly here:
In June 2011 LulzSec took down the CIA.gov website in an attack masterminded by Al-Bassam
…
Cleary was jailed for 32 months, Ackroyd for 30 months and Davis for two years, while Al-Bassam was given a 20-month suspended sentence
I hope the Garda get the power to check computers of men who are down loading porn and send them all to prison for hard labour.
Why?
Alan,Because its wrong and leads to assaults on women.
Ah, here we go..
Can you support that claim with statistics?
So it’s ok for women to download porn? What about couples who watch it together?
Menshealth.com did a survey. 87% of men have viewed porn online in the past year. Lock us up Denise. Hope the ban-guards don’t shirk in their responsibility of locking up their male colleagues!!
Only 87%!
She’s only taking the piss
When women watch porn it’s obviously because they have been led to believe that women are inferior by the patriarchy that infests all MANkind and therefore want to be more like their ‘betters’ and engage in watching porn. . . . Or something like that.
13% of men are liars
I guess I’m going to prison so………what’s the going rate nowadays for gigs upon gigs of porn,
Most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard
FFS Denise are you for real?? Would you suggest checking men AND women for naughty thoughts next….. huh?? Cos somebody’s gona be very very busy!!
BS
Fecking muppets. Enjoy the showers in prison plonkers
The Garda should be allowed to check all mens computers to see if they are down loading dirty porn, and if so send them to prison for hard labour.
Why? It’s not illegal.
Face palm @ Alan
She mentioned dirty porn. This is not illegal in Ireland and yet she calls for ceiminal proceedings. If she specified a particular aspect (i.e. child porn) that was I would not question it.
Define ‘dirty’ porn.
Don’t feed the trolls.
They should start with your computer Denise
Shagging in a field.
What’s dirty porn ? Is the porn I watch clean…. eg….. Pop corn…
I gotta try more trolling the responses are priceless
I’m guessing the thought police would have to be called though?
Precisely Tony!
I think it’s a joke Alan…porn and hard labour, c’mon people’s
Get a life
I reckon by dirty porn she means anal
One man one cup
Anyone else thinking of the Futurama episode with the Nudar (naked alien hackers) in it and their sprungers while reading this article…..?
Very poor headline. Can journalists not think up their own headlines instead of reguritating biased corporate media crap.
Is it just me r would anyone else give that anti-porn freak Denise 1
01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110111 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110101 01110000 00100001 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100101 01100101 01110000 01101100 01100101
Not sure they were caught because of leaving an online trail, the guy in the U.S. was caught and gave the rest of them up, old style. Wouldn’t community service be much better and out their obvious talents to positive use?
These kids are most likely not the main people behind these attacks. Young lads persuaded to “hack” for Lulzec to cover the tracks of the main guys. Anyway hackers from these collectives have worked with the FBI to gather evidence against their own online friends after being caught so they get lighter sentences. A bunch of individuals is all they are.
Statistics say dat only 1 in 5 men watch porn on a regular basis
They also say 4 out of 5 men are liars!
Yo Joe, a link to back you up would be appreciated, otherwise I looks like you are talking BS.
If they had any brains, they wouldn’t have Fcuked with the CIA, and prob wouldn’t have gotten time for sony and the like.
Interestingly, what hasn’t been mentioned here is that Cleary suffered from Asperger’s syndrome and Davis had been diagnosed with depression. That said, Cleary was also found guilty of accessing child pornography, which lessens my sympathy for him somewhat.
A more thorough article can be found here on Ars:
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