The FBI has arrested an Ohio resident suspected of participating in two recent Anonymous attacks against law enforcement websites in Utah.
According to legal documents obtained by InformationWeek, John Anthony Borell III, 21, was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of computer intrusion involving SQL injection attacks – with each count carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
The first attack targeted the Salt Lake City police department website (slcpd.com) and allegedly caused $33,000 in damages.
In addition to targeting the site, Anonymous extracted 473 records containing police officers’ usernames, hashed passwords, full names, titles, email addresses, and phone numbers which were subsequently uploaded to Pastebin.
The second attack was executed against the Utah Chiefs of Police Association website (utahchiefs.org) and apparently incurred a whopping $150,000 in damages. Like the Salt Lake City attack, the collective also published an online list containing the name, email address, and hashed password for 24 Utah chiefs of police.
Borell, who was arraigned Monday, pled not guilty to the above-mentioned charges. Interestingly enough, the suspect was apparently detained after failing to anonymize his identity. Indeed, the FBI tracked him down via an active Twitter account on which he had claimed credit for both attacks.
“On March 2, 2012, Twitter provided information for the accounts…[including] IP addresses used by the accounts, all Twitter messages sent using the accounts, direct messages sent to and from the accounts, and basic user information for the accounts, such as the email address that created the account,” FBI special agent Eric Zimmerman confirmed in court documents.
