The unidentified man faces a potential 10 year prison stretch on hacking-related charges.
The self-professed head of LulzSec is behind bars in Australia, after an arrest Tuesday night. The as yet unidentified 24-year-old was caught after an investigation into an attack on an Australian government web site earlier this month. He could spend as much as 10 years in jail, if convicted on two hacking-related charges.
“The [Australian Federal Police] has zero tolerance for this kind of behavior,” says Glen McEwan, manager of A.F.P. cybercrime operations. The man, who uses the online tag Aush0k, had repeatedly claimed on forums that he was the leader of LulzSec, and didn’t deny it when arrested. He is alleged to have abused his position as an I.T. specialist at a Sydney-based company to obtain confidential information from clients, which was then used to help LulzSec’s hacking efforts.
LulzSec has often claimed that the motivation behind its hacks has been entertainment, and numbers among its targets the likes of Bethesda, a porn database, and Nintendo. The group became widely known after it intervened in the WikiLeaks scandal, waging a series of cyber attacks in retaliation for the attempted shutdown of WikiLeaks’ website. Sabu, aka Hector Xavier Monsegur, one of the co-founders of the group, turned F.B.I. informant when caught in 2011, and from that point began turning in his former LuzSec partners. Several other LulzSec members have since been arrested. Cody Kretsinger, another LulzSec alumnus, has also reached an agreement with prosecutors after his conviction last week in Los Angeles on hacking-related charges.
Source: New York Times
Published: Apr 25, 2013 01:45 pm