UPDATED 12:26 EDT / JUNE 26 2012

NEWS

LulzSec Hackers Admit DDoS Attacks on High Profile Sites, including CIA, NHS, and Sony

Two of the LulzSec hackers, one of the most notorious internet hackers group, have entered the guilty pleas today for disabling some high profile websites and performing Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Ryan Cleary, 24, and Jake “Topiary” Davis, 19 have admitted hacking CIA, National Health Service, News International, Sony, Nintendo, Arizona State Police, and film studio 20th Century Fox websites, among several others.

The hacker duo flooded these website with traffic to make them crash, resulting in DDoS. Some other websites that became a victim of attack included Westboro Baptist Church, Bethesda, Eve Online, HBGary, HBGary Federal, PBS Inc, and Infragard. Both Cleary and Davis entered guilty pleas at Southwark Crown Court, but denied the allegations they posted ‘unlawfully obtained confidential computer data’ to public websites including LulzSec.com, Pirate Bay, and PasteBin, to encourage offences contrary to the Serious Crime Act. Clearly was firstly arrested in June 2011, followed by Davis’s arrest in the same year. Besides in U.K., he is also in the ‘wanted’ list of U.S. cyber criminals. Two more alleged co-hackers Ryan Ackroyd, 25, and a 17-year-old A-level student, from south-London have also been held, but have denied guilty.

LulzSec has always been a matter of headache for the internet security tribe, and of course the victim websites. Just two days back, the group finished collating through numerous leaks and other information they gathered from directing other hacker groups to attack government websites and released a megaton smartbomb of leaked information from Arizona’s Department of Public Safety. On the top of that, it promised to release information from the various leaks it has received from this operation every week to embarrass military and law enforcement officials engaged in politics that it does not agree with.

Earlier this month, group “LulzSec Reborn” released a heap of Twitter authentication details owned by users who signed for TweetGif, an animated GIF-sharing application. They published a .SQL file on Pastebin.org containing a staggering amount of detail about the user accounts, which resulted in over 10,000 compromised Twitter accounts. Not to forget the disaster they did last year with the repeated attacks on the Sony network. They claimed the compromise and stolen information of over 1 million Sony account users, which included passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts.


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