DailyTech - More Anonymous and LulzSec Folks End up in Prison Awaiting Charges

Submit News

Internet More Anonymous and LulzSec Folks End up in Prison Awaiting Charges
Jason Mick (Blog) - September 23, 2011 9:51 AM

29 comment(s) - last by PrezWeezy.. on Sep 26 at 3:20 PM

Another member of LulzSec has fallen to police efforts. Only two members (Avunit and Sabu) remain at large. (Source: FBI)

Federal authorities appear to slowly be catching some of those involved in recent attacks

LulzSec has fallen silent, with nary a Twitter post in two months. The pace of its successor AntiSec's efforts has slowed. And top LulzSec chief Topiary -- who turned out to be a teenager native of the UK's Shetland Islands -- awaits trial, after being caught by authorities who traced an account he used to play Xbox games online.

Now more arrests are pouring in. A 23-year-old Phoenix, Arizona native, Cody Andrew Kretsinger, has been arrested ("recursion"). You may recall that recursion showed up at numerous times in LulzSec's chat logs during the attacks [1][2][3] on Sony Corp. (TYO:6758), but quit the group in June [source] as it stepped up attacks on the U.S. government. Recursion reportedly was a relatively novice hacker relying heavily on SQL injection, a technique frowned upon by more sophisticated hackers.

Police in the UK last month also arrested 5 men ages 16 to 26 who allegedly together managed LulzSec chief Kayla's online identity. Kayla claimed to be "a 16 year-old girl." LulzSec/Anonymous chief Sabu confirms that Kayla has been arrested, though he/she has not verified that the UK authorities theory of multiple users' involvement is true.

According to Sabu, he and one other LulzSec member are the only ones walking free. Topiary, Kayla, Recursion, Tflow, Pwnsauce, and Palladium have all been arrested. The other remaining free member appears to be Avunit, who was not a founding member, but participated in many of the group's key attacks.

Of course LulzSec was only a particularly bold subclan of the greater hacking collective Anonymous, who lives on via its thousands of members. But active attackers within Anonymous have been hit with recent arrests as well. Christopher Doyon, 47, of Mountain View, California, and Joshua Covelli, 26, of Fairborn, Ohio, allegedly members of Anonymous subclan People's Liberation Front, were arrested this week for allegedly orchestrating a distributed denial of service attack on the county of Santa Cruz, California back in 2010.

Anonymous isn't willing to go down without a fight, though. Despite the recent arrests, members like Sabu remain defiant. They have planned a "Day of Vengeance" on various parties in New York City in response to crackdowns on Wall Street protesters. In a note for the group-without-a-leader writes, "... Anonymous and other cyber liberation groups will launch a series of cyber attacks against various targets including Wall Street, Corrupt Banking Institutions - and the NYC Police Department."

Comments

Threshold

Username	Please enter your username
Password	Please enter your password
remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

Inevitable

By skyflier on 9/23/2011 10:04:05 AM , Rating: 5

Who has the last Lulz now?

RE: Inevitable

By Joz on 9/23/2011 10:11:30 AM , Rating: 2

The machines.

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By MrBlastman on 9/23/2011 11:00:13 AM , Rating: 3

Bubba.

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By tastyratz on 9/23/2011 12:23:29 PM , Rating: 2

in... federal "pound me in the ass" prison?

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By Natch on 9/23/2011 1:38:21 PM , Rating: 3

Let's see how defiant they're feeling, when that steel door clangs shut behind them!

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By TerranMagistrate on 9/23/2011 4:03:51 PM , Rating: 2

What about conjugal visits?

"Can we have sex with women? OK, I do it!" -Samir

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By Xcpus on 9/23/11, Rating: 0

By Xcpus on 9/23/2011 7:59:40 PM , Rating: 0

You're assuming that this is over...

This is only just beginning. The people will have the last laugh while the US Empire and any other Empire seeking to take its place will be left in ruins.

Like the fall of Rome... oh what a glorious fall it will be and quite deserved tbh. But of course some people's nationalism (not patriotism) will lead them to vote down this comment.

To those people I ask... if there was doubt of Troy Davis' guilt then he is not guilty... it is only logical. Georgia murdered an innocent man. Also worth pointing out that although Retribution is a part of justice it is in no way the whole of what Justice is. Many innocent people are murdered by the American State.

That young man, Kelly Thomas, who was beaten and tazered to death while he apologized out loud and called out for his father to protect him. Horrid scene but happens daily in, what is increasingly becoming, a US police state.

Right now they're talking about more bailouts for banks and the Federal Reserve is targetting its sights on Europe for Quantitative Easing (more bailouts of French Banks as they hold Greek debt and JP Morgan holds the French Debt).

If Germany refuses to bailout Greece then the USA will likely step in and bailout the French banks in order to bailout Greece in an effort to keep JP Morgan solvent as the debt that JP Morgan holds in those French Banks is more than their market cap and assets combined.

Then there are the wars and US drone attacks. US drone attacks have so far killed a handful of suspected "terrorists" while slaughtering hundreds of innocent men, women and children. The war in Iraq has an official body count of over 100K (over 1 million between Iraq and Afghanistan since these conflicts began). These wars are costing the American tax payers a fortune and creating animosity and hatred towards the "west" as a whole world wide.

Sony has been suing old grannies and young children ruining their financial lives and forcing them to have to accept settlements for illegally downloaded material many of which was not downloaded by the users themselves.

And lets not get into the Diplomatic cables and other issues going on.

And lulzsec/anonymous are the bad guys? Yeah... I think you need your head examined.

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By ekv on 9/24/2011 2:38:10 AM , Rating: 2

quote:
You're assuming that this is over...

It is over, for the guys that got caught. And soon enough for their friends.

The wheels of justice grind slowly but they grind finely. Once the damn lawyers get involved the enterprise is sunk. [Just look how well Obama is doing].

quote:
And lulzsec/anonymous are the bad guys?

Yeah. And you even agree.

quote:
Yeah... I think you need your head examined.

Seriously, what did you hope to accomplish with your rant? Disappointed with the world? Not all roses is it. Where is your hope placed?

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By inperfectdarkness on 9/24/2011 3:53:45 AM , Rating: 2

and yet, we're a paradise compared to iran, china, yemen, etc, etc, etc....

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By inperfectdarkness on 9/24/2011 4:19:41 AM , Rating: 5

-the downfall of the USA will be as a direct result of a departure from the principles on which it was founded.

-for every failure of the US justice system, i can point out a homosexual who was executed in iran, or a political prisoner whose organs were harvested--live--in china. it's easy to point fingers when the target of your venom won't issue a fatwah on your head because you spoke up.

-financial insolvency and irresponsibility is systemic; hardly isolated to just the USA. of course, our largest external creditor has an average living condition that makes our hobo's look like feudal lords.

-i was unaware you had unrestricted access to all classified info regarding the results of drone strikes. i'll invite you to provide 1 shred of evidence supporting your ludicrous claims that we supposedly kill more innocents than we kill terrorists. and you'll also need to support your "1 million dead" comment.

furthermore, your "clever" method of writing skews the reader to think that the US is directly responsible for the total number of deaths that have occured. truth is, the VAST majority of deaths suffered in the iraq/afghanistan since 2001 are due to ethnic clashes, infighting, and terrorism. in fact, the trend over the last 2 years has been that many of these terrorist bombs that have gone off have exponential more casualties within the indigenous population--than within the coalition forces.

-sony is based in japan. seriously, if you were going to take a pot shot at US business that are going to bring the apocalypse, you could have at least picked apple. jeez.

Parent

RE: Inevitable

By Ammohunt on 9/24/2011 10:59:17 AM , Rating: 2

Spoken like a true spoiled brat of the west go live in a third world shithole for a year then see if you still believe what you are saying.

Parent

You can't hide

By SiliconJon on 9/23/2011 12:17:06 PM , Rating: 2

You can't hide your location on a communications network that has every single bit duplicated and mirrored to government systems, silly. Only the amount of desire they have to catch you determines their level of pursuit.

Unless you're dynamically altering everything on your system (all hardware and software identifiables) with every connection and accessing from random physical locations there's no hiding from the eyes that see all.

RE: You can't hide

By PrezWeezy on 9/23/2011 3:21:41 PM , Rating: 2

quote:
a communications network that has every single bit duplicated and mirrored to government systems

Paranoid much?

Parent

RE: You can't hide

By greylica on 9/23/2011 4:53:12 PM , Rating: 2

He isn't a paranoid, it's real. The government are using systems near ''Echelon IV'' from the DeusEx Game. There is no escape once you're on the electronic trace. And there is no way of using alternate protocols once everything is mounted on top of IPV4/IPV6 nowadays. There is source and destination, simple as that. Even with such a decentralized way of comunicating with nearby systems that aren't exactly traceable by other country authorities, people that uses proprietary software normally will never know if their computers are sending discrete signals to some destination whereas identifiable information can be found, obviously, those guys uses technologies like wireshark to determine ''ins and outs'' of their computers to avoid be caugh, but once you dispare discrete signals to a tree of bots, some reversible information are stored in routers that could lead authorities to you. Ok, you can travel a lot, and send discrete signals to bots from where you are, but in fact, again, you will need a source and destination in order to those services get alive and active, then you have to send discrete alive signals from those infected machines to a destination, you can have lot's of destination for a botnet, but you will again need a source and destination, some uses domains to it ( those are being killed sistematically by giants like Microsoft and Governments )
But I can tell you one thing that is far more dangerous to be caugh working in an extensive botnet ( in fact, it's hard to be caugh once you have an extense range of Ips serving you...)

It's to put your head outside of wonderland...

Parent

RE: You can't hide

By geddarkstorm on 9/24/2011 12:08:41 AM , Rating: 2

I'd like to introduce you to a lovely concept called encryption, and onion routing, if you're really that worried.

Parent

RE: You can't hide

By ekv on 9/24/2011 2:29:06 AM , Rating: 1

Hmmm

1) encryption. It does scramble the message, but does nothing to hide, say, IP headers. The guy you're replying to kept talking about "source and destination". Encryption does nothing to obfuscate that. If you are LulzSec (or whatever) then you were trying to hide your true location. Otherwise you eventually get a knock on the door (if you're lucky).

2) onion routing. Effective but not guaranteed. Even something like TAILS
https://tails.boum.org/
states upfront that TOR really isn't designed to defeat a global adversary. Umm, I think if you F*** with the CIA I suspect you will have just that kind of adversary.

There are other protocols in R&D that are specifically designed to make traffic analysis quite difficult. Haven't heard of anything that works reasonably well [i.e. like TAILS over the Internet, only better].

Lastly, given that LulzSec has been quiet as a mouse lately, I suspect that Eschelon is real.

Parent

RE: You can't hide

By SiliconJon on 9/24/2011 1:16:10 PM , Rating: 2

So tell me how many points it takes to secure a connection? And how many points does it take to infiltrate a connection?

A) 2, 1

Parent

RE: You can't hide

By SiliconJon on 9/24/2011 12:52:23 PM , Rating: 2

Condemn without investigation much?

What do you get when you upgrade ECHELON to TIA?

AT&T sued over NSA spy program
http://news.cnet.com/ATT-sued-over-NSA-spy-program...

The Spy Factory
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/spy-factory....

EFF - NSA Spying
http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying

AT&T whistleblower: I was forced to connect 'big brother machine'
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2007/Countdown_Telcom...

AT&T whistleblower claims to document illegal NSA surveillance
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6058346-7.html#i...

Or were you deliberately being Orwellian by using "paranoid" to actually mean aware of realities of persecution? On that same doublespeak note, we've redefined whistleblowing to now mean of treason or terrorism.

Parent

RE: You can't hide

By PrezWeezy on 9/26/2011 3:20:40 PM , Rating: 2

Frank Blaco, former head of the NSA:
"Movies like Enemy of the State make those of us in the intelligence community laugh. They make us look omniscient, like we can collect anything we want, see anything we want. It's just not that way."

Parent

Police arrested 5 men...

By masamasa on 9/23/2011 11:08:46 AM , Rating: 3

Police in the UK last month also arrested 5 men ages 16 to 26 who allegedly together managed LulzSec chief Kayla's online identity. The 5 men were jobless, lived in their mom's basement, and were addicted to porn and Mountain Dew.

RE: Police arrested 5 men...

By Gondor on 9/24/2011 6:28:26 PM , Rating: 2

Mmm, porn ...

Parent

To be continued

By Taft12 on 9/23/2011 11:44:33 AM , Rating: 5

Jason, please keep us updated as these cases go to trial. I am curious to see what evidence the prosecution is able to successfully get admitted.

We recently had a "IP-Address Is Not a Person" ruling in a copyright infringement suit and it would be very interesting to see how solid the proof is that gets introduced, and what the defense is able to get thrown out.

Couldn't happen to nicer people

By Beenthere on 9/23/2011 10:35:55 AM , Rating: 2

What goes around...

RE: Couldn't happen to nicer people

By MrBlastman on 9/23/2011 11:01:06 AM , Rating: 2

Gives no reacharound. They'll be wishing for one. ;)

Parent

Funny...

By johnsmith9875 on 9/24/2011 7:12:47 PM , Rating: 3

Interesting how fast the law clamps down on anybody who dares challenge the wealthy corporations, but when a corporation steals billions, law enforcement is simply too busy to investigate or to punish.

Ain't that America, for you and me...

In the meantime

By Chaser on 9/23/2011 1:05:57 PM , Rating: 2

I think I'll rent a PS3 game from Redbox this weekend.

Not a good idea...

By Bostlabs on 9/23/2011 10:36:44 AM , Rating: 1

"Anonymous and other cyber liberation groups will launch a series of cyber attacks against various targets including Wall Street, Corrupt Banking Institutions - and the NYC Police Department."

Yes those type of attacks have worked wonders for your fellow members... wait, they have been arrested right?

So this isn't a good idea then. Here's one: get out while you can.