British police working with the FBI arrested a 19-year-old man over attacks by a hacker group on businesses and government agencies including the CIA, US Senate and Sony, Scotland Yard said Tuesday. The man, named in reports as Ryan Cleary, was detained on Monday at a house in the suburban town of Wickford in Essex, south-east England, in connection with a month-long global rampage by the Lulz Security group.
He was being questioned Tuesday at a central London police station. "Yes, the arrest is in connection with the Lulz Security attacks. We believe this to be a significant arrest," a police source confirmed to AFP on condition of anonymity. But the group played down the arrest in a posting on its official Twitter account. It has announced previous hacking attacks on the same account that turned out to be genuine.
"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," said the posting. In a statement, Scotland Yard said its specialist cyber-crime team had arrested the man in a "pre-planned intelligence-led operation" on suspicion of computer misuse and fraud offences.
"The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a number of international businesses and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group," it said. DDoS attacks overwhelm websites with traffic, making them sluggish or unresponsive.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.