Gardaí arrest man after probe into global computer-hacking collective
Gardaí have arrested one of five men being sought in connection with the activities of computer-hacking collective LulzSec.
The man - in his late teens - was detained in Dublin this morning and is being questioned at Terenure garda station.
He is being held under section 4 of the criminal justice act, and can be detained for up to 24 hours.
Leading members of the computer-hacking collective LulzSec have also been arrested and will face charges in New York, officials said today.
Five people with the loosely organised group will be charged. The details of the allegations were not immediately available, but are expected to be made public in court documents being unsealed later.
Hackers associated with the group – full name Lulz Security – have claimed to be responsible for a variety of cyber attacks on big companies, law enforcement and government agencies.
Law enforcement officials later said five people were either under arrest or being sought.
LulzSec is a spin-off of the loosely organised hacking collective Anonymous.
Its members attained notoriety last May by attacking the website of the US public broadcaster PBS and posting a story claiming that the killed rapper Tupac Shakur was alive and living in New Zealand.
Some alleged associates of the group are already facing charges elsewhere. An English teenager, Ryan Cleary, was arrested by British police in June and charged with being linked to the group.
In July, a reputed LulzSec spokesman, Jake Davis, was arrested in Scotland.
The first court document to become available was a criminal information against Hector Xavier Monsegur, charging the Manhattan resident with conspiracy to engage in computer hacking, among other charges.
Authorities say he pleaded guilty to the charges on August 15.
According to the court papers, he was an “influential member of three hacking organisations – Anonymous, Internet Feds and Lulz Security – that were responsible for multiple cyber attacks on the computer systems of various businesses and governments in the United States and throughout the world”.
According to the court papers, he acted as a “rooter”, a computer hacker who identified vulnerabilities in the computer systems of potential victims.
The court papers said he participated in several cyber attacks from December 2010 through to last June 7 as part of Anonymous, including attacks on Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, and government computers in Tunisia, Algeria, Yemeni and Zimbabwe.
As part of Internet Feds, he was alleged to have participated in attacks against various business and government entities in the United States and throughout the world, including HBGary, a private security firm, Fox Broadcasting and the Tribune.
The court papers said he formed LulzSec last May with other elite hackers, who then attacked various divisions of Sony as well as the Public Broadcasting Service, the United States Senate, Unveillance, a cyber security firm headquartered in Delaware, and Bethesday Softworks, a video game company based in Maryland in the US.
