The FBI has arrested three men on suspicion of having carried out hacking attacks against Sony Pictures and Santa Cruz County websites.
Cody Kretsinger, 23, from Phoenix, Arizona, was arrested yesterday and has been charged with conspiracy and the unauthorised impairment of a protected computer in connection with the Sony attack in May and June.
“From approximately May 27, 2011, through June 2, 2011, the computer systems of Sony Pictures Entertainment were compromised by a group known as ‘LulzSec’, or ‘Lulz Security’, whose members anonymously claimed responsibility on LulzSec’s website,” says the FBI in a statement.
“Kretsinger, also known by the moniker ‘recursion’, is believed to be a current or former member of LulzSec. The extent of damage caused by the compromise at Sony Pictures is under investigation.”
According to the indictment, Kretsinger used a proxy server to mask or hide his IP address. It says that he and coconspirators used an SQL injection attack to obtain confidential information from Sony Pictures’ computer systems, which they then posted on LulzSec’s website.
The indictment says that Kretsinger then permanently erased the hard drive of the computer he used to conduct the attack on Sony Pictures.
Kretsinger was yesterday bailed by a federal magistrate in Phoenix. If cound guilty, he faces 15 years in jail.
Meanwhile, another man has been arrested in San Francisco, according to reports, and charges are being secured against a third in Ohio. Both men are suspected of having been involved in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Santa Cruz County, California’s servers last year.
According to Fox News, search warrants are also being executed in New Jersey, Minnesota and Montana.
