“The cutting edge of cybercrime”—Lulzsec hackers get up to 32 months in jail
LONDON, UKThe four British Lulzsec hackersMustafa "tflow" al-Bassam, Ryan "kayla" Ackroyd, Jake "topiary" Davis, and Ryan "ViraL" Clearywere sentenced today to between 20 and 32 months in jail for crimes committed during Lulzsec's 50 day hacking spree in 2011. Prosecutors described the men as being at the "cutting edge of contemporary and emerging criminal offending known as cybercrime" and as "latter-day pirates."
At previous hearings, al-Bassam, 18, of Peckham, London, and Davis, 20, of the Shetland Islands, entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy to commit DDoS attacks against targets including Westboro Baptist Church, Sony, Bethesda, and EVE Online. They also pled to conspiracy to hack targets including Nintendo, Sony (again), PBS, and HBGary. Ackroyd, 26, of Yorkshire, pled guilty only to the hacking charge.
For these crimes, al-Bassam was sentenced to 20 months, suspended for two years and received 300 hours of community service. Davis was sentenced to 24 months in a young offender's institute, of which 12 months must be served. Time served on bail with an electronic tag counts towards this, leaving Davis with 38 days remaining on his sentence. Ackroyd was sentenced to 30 months.
Cleary, 21, of Wickford, Essex, pled guilty to both of these charges and a further four: constructing a massive botnet, making that botnet available to others, hacking into a Pentagon system, and performing DDoS attacks against DreamHost. Cleary also entered a guilty plea against three counts of possession of indecent images of children. (After his arrest, forensic examination of his PC revealed a deleted directory containing 172 sexual images of children as young as six months.)
For building the botnet Cleary was sentenced to 18 months, which will run concurrent with an eight month sentence for making the botnet available to Anonymous. For the charges shared with al-Bassam and Davis he was sentenced to 20 months. That sentence will also run concurrent with the botnet charges. For the Pentagon and Dreamhost attacks he was sentenced to 12 and eight months respectively. These sentences will run concurrent with each otherbut consecutive to the other four
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/05/the-cutting-edge-of-cybercrime-lulzsec-hackers-get-up-to-32-months-in-jail/