LulzSec Leader Sabu Unmasked, Aids FBI Hacker Sweep
Feds arrest alleged members of LulzSec, Anonymous, and AntiSec, charge them with attacks on Sony, PBS, Stratfor, and other sites.
Anonymous: 10 Facts About The Hacktivist Group (click image for larger view and for slideshow)
The FBI and U.S. Attorneys Office Tuesday announced that five principal members of the hacktivist groups Anonymous and its offshoot, LulzSec, have been arrested and charged. The men were located both in the United States and abroad.
According to the indictment, unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, the charged men include Ryan Ackroyd (aka kayla, lol, lolspoon), Jake Davis (aka topiary, atopiary), Darren Martyn (aka pwnsauce, raepsauce, networkkitten), and Donncha OCearrbhail (aka Palladium). The men have been charged with hacking Fox Broadcasting Company,
Sony Pictures Entertainment
, and the
Public Broadcasting Service
(aka PBS).
According to the indictment, OCearrbhail was responsible for surreptitiously
recording a conference call
between the FBI and Scotland Yard in January. Parts of the call, released in early February, suggested that further arrests or charges were set to be made or announced within weeks, although some related details--such as suspects names--were bleeped out of the recording.
[ Even hackers fall victim to malware. Read
Anonymous Allies Hit With Zeus Malware
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According to the indictment, OCearrbhail was able to join the conference call after hacking into the personal email account for an officer in Irelands national police service, known as the An Garda Siochana (or Garda), who had made a security mistake. Because the Garda officer had forwarded work emails to a personal account, OCearrbhail learned information about how to access a conference call that the Garda, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies were planning to hold on January 17, 2012, regarding international investigations of Anonymous and other hacking groups, according to the indictment.
Meanwhile, authorities disclosed that Hector Xavier Monsegur, (aka Sabu, Xavier DeLeon, Leon) had been arrested last year, after which he agreed to work with the bureau as an informant. Furthermore, on August 15, 2011, according to the indictment, Monsegur pled guilty to a 12-count information charging him with computer hacking conspiracies, among other crimes. The charges related to hacks of
HBGary and HBGary Federal
, as well as Sony Pictures Entertainment and
Fox Broadcasting
. Authorities also charged him with
hacking the Atlanta chapter of InfraGard
, a private, non-profit group that exists to serve as a public/private partnership with the FBI.
A sixth man, Jeremy Hammond (aka Anarchaos, sup_g, burn, yohoho, POW, tylerknowsthis, crediblethreat), was arrested late Monday in Chicago and charged with hacking into the website global intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, better known as
Stratfor
, in December 2011. Authorities said that Hammond had identified himself as a member of the
LulzSec and Anonymous spin-off group AntiSec
.
In the indictment, authorities sought to make clear connections between AntiSec and the other hacktivist groups. In publicizing the Stratfor hack, members of AntiSec reaffirmed their connection to Anonymous and other related groups, including LulzSec. For example, AntiSec members published a document with links to the stolen Stratfor data entitled: Anonymous Lulzxmas rooting you proud on a file sharing website, it read.
Law enforcement agencies had been steadily announcing the arrests of various LulzSec and Anonymous members. Notably, British police
busted Jake Davis
, an 18-year old living in the north of Scotland, and who authorities accused of being LulzSecs PR-savvy spokesman Topiary, in July 2011. Meanwhile, at the beginning of September 2011, Scotland Yard arrested a man who they said was
core LulzSec member Kayla
, who was named in the indictment unsealed Tuesday as Ryan Ackroyd.
Sabu, however, appeared to remain at large, though he apparently granted an interview in October 2011, during which he disclosed that LulzSec and
Anonymous still had a cache of hacked data
from HSBC and Koch Brothers stored on a secret server in China.
But in fact, Sabu had been arrested before--and perhaps even helped authorities to positively identify--Ackroyd and Davis. According to Fox News,
Monsegur (aka Sabu) was arrested
by FBI agents in June 2011, after his
identity was doxed
--meaning he was named in an online post--earlier that month. The bureau accelerated its arrest plans, in case the identity disclosure spooked Monsegur into attempting to cover his tracks.
Authorities had put Monsegur under surveillance after he accidentally logged into a chat board without disguising his IP address. Hes extremely intelligent, a law enforcement official told Fox News. Brilliant, but lazy.
The arrest revelation makes it clear why LulzSec
called it quits
in late June 2011, after a
50-day hacking spree
: its anti-authority leader had been busted and turned informant.
Lazy or not, when it came to tripping up, the odds were apparently against the LulzSec crew. When youre running this kind of operation for a long time, especially with not very concrete plans, youre bound to make mistakes, Tal Beery, lead Web researcher at Imperva,
told
USA Today
last year.
The mistakes LulzSec and Anonymous made during their hacking spree left an electronic trail with enough footprints to produce todays arrests, said Rob Rachwald, director of security strategy at Imperva, in a
blog post
.
The right forensic tools in the right hands are just a start. The new
Digital Detectives
issue of Dark Reading shows you how to better apply the lessons they teach. (Free registration required.)
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LulzSec Leader Sabu Unmasked, Aids FBI Hacker Sweep