FBI Busts Suspected LulzSec Hacker In Sony Breach

Authorities have charged three men as part of ongoing investigations into LulzSec and Anonymous attacks against government servers and Sony websites.

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An alleged member of hacking group LulzSec, 23-year-old Cody Kretsinger, was arrested in Phoenix on Thursday by the FBI. The same day, the bureau arrested a man in San Francisco whos suspected of participating in Anonymous-related attacks, and announced similar charges against a third man, based in Ohio.
Related search warrants were also executed in Minnesota, Montana, and New Jersey, according to
Fox News
, which broke the story.
A federal indictment, unsealed Thursday morning, alleges that Kretsinger is the LulzSec member known as recursion. Hes accused of participating in
online attacks against Sony Pictures
from May 27, 2011, until June 2, 2011, the full extent of which Sony is
still investigating
, said authorities. The indictment also alleges that Kretsinger used a proxy server to try and mask his IP address, and that he and his co-attackers used
SQL injection attacks
to compromise the Sony Pictures website, after which they posted 150,000 stolen usernames and passwords on the LulzSec website, and then announced the exploit on Twitter.
[ Protect yourself and your systems. Read
14 Enterprise Security Tips From Anonymous Hacker
]
Another federal indictment, also unsealed Thursday, alleges that Christopher Doyon, 47, of Mountain View, Calif., and Joshua Covelli, 26, of Fairborn, Ohio, participated in a 2010
distributed-denial-of-service attack
against servers run by the Santa Cruz County government in California. According to the indictment, the attack was conducted under the banner of the
Peoples Liberation Front
, which works with Anonymous.
Unconfirmed news reports said that the man arrested by authorities on Thursday in San Francisco was Doyon. Reports also said he was homeless.
The arrests, if legit, could have a significant impact on hacking, said Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, in a
blog post
. Hackers may not be as willing to trumpet their activities--a major driver of hacktivism. Further, it may impede recruitment of new hackers who could now be a little more gun-shy.
LulzSec, also known as Lulz Security or the Lulz Boat,
said it was ending
its self-publicized 50-day hacking spree in June. But according to
chat logs
obtained by the
Guardian
, some members exited LulzSec early, over fears that the group had gone too far. Notably, recursion appeared to quit the group on June 3, together with devrandom, after LulzSec members
hacked the Atlanta chapter
of FBI affiliate InfraGard. The leader of LulzSec, Sabu, dismissed their exit, saying they were not up for the heat.
Sabu, among
other known LulzSec members
, remains at large, and apparently at work. This week, a post to his Twitter account threatened reprisals if Troy Davis--then on death row in Georgia--was executed. Word is the Supreme Court gave a 7 day reprieve for the execution. He still can be executed within this week. DONT YOU DARE, said the post. Davis was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday.
Arrests of accused members of LulzSec and Anonymous have been
intensifying
in recent months, both in the United States and abroad. In July, the FBI
arrested 14 people
on charges of having participated in Anonymous attacks against PayPal. The same month, Italian authorities
arrested 15 people
over Anonymous attacks. British authorities, meanwhile, have made multiple related arrests. Notably, they
arrested teenager Jake Davis
in July, alleging that he served as the LulzSec spokesman known as Topiary.
According to Rachwald, many LulzSec and Anonymous hackers have made two significant errors: they attracted significant attention, and they didnt properly cover their tracks. If you look at hacking historically, over the past 20 years many of the high-profile attacks or those that involve serious losses to governments or commercial companies have ended up with law enforcement finding the perpetrators eventually, such as Albert Gonzalez, he said, referring to the mastermind behind the
hack of TJX
.
Interestingly, the hack of TJX--resulting in the theft of 45.6 million credit and debit card numbers--continued for a year and a half before being discovered, and it took authorities another year and a half to indict and arrest Gonzalez. But LulzSec and Anonymous members, by trumpeting their own exploits, appear to have handed investigators numerous, timely leads, enabling authorities to identify and arrest suspects much more quickly.
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FBI Busts Suspected LulzSec Hacker In Sony Breach