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Two UK Lulzsec Suspects Plead Guilty To DDoS Charges 82

judgecorp writes "Two teens have pleaded guilty to taking part in Lulzsec attacks on the U.S.'s CIA and Britain's SOCA. Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis, aged 19 and 18 respectively, admit to denial of service attacks. Cleary has also been charged in the U.S., but is unlikely to face extradition." However, "... both Cleary and Davis denied allegations they posted 'unlawfully obtained confidential computer data' to public websites including LulzSec.com, Pirate Bay, and PasteBin, in order to encourage offenses contrary to the Serious Crime Act." Two others involved pleaded not guilty to all charges.
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Two UK Lulzsec Suspects Plead Guilty To DDoS Charges

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  • Age (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dexter Herbivore ( 1322345 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:18AM (#40449647) Journal
    I get the feeling that the bulk of Lulzsec will be about their age or lower.
    • Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mtinsley ( 1283400 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:24AM (#40449683) Homepage
      Seems likely. Young and impressionable makes for good cannon fodder for those who are actually running the show.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Seems likely. Young and impressionable makes for good cannon fodder for those who are actually running the show.

        "those who are actually running the show" are probably also teenagers or possibly young adults. As far as I can tell all targets have been accused of doing unethical things and that kind of activism is almost exclusively done by idealistic youngsters.
        Lulzsec is also pretty harmless since it is only dealing with hacktivism and doesn't really try to do "real world damage". To become a Lulzsec you pretty much have that common combination of acting like an ass on a global scale and have an incompetent IT-depart

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        For many months it was the FBI running the show and were actively enticing minors into committing criminal acts, which were carried. Note, the FBI also did criminally fail to charge Hector Xavier Monsegur with the serious charge of child abuse for recruiting and leading minors in criminal acts, making those FBI agents guilty of being accessories after the fact and conspiring to obstruct the course of justice, the FBI even lied in court about Hector Xavier Monsegur role, reducing his lead role of child abu

      • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

        Or they were low hanging fruit. Someone they had a blizzard of info on who they could make some feeble connection to the group.

        In the US the ATF sets up stooges all the time.

    • Re:Age (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dr_Barnowl ( 709838 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:28AM (#40449697)

      They may even have just cherry picked the only ones they could find of legal age. I can't believe they only had evidence on two of them.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        They may even have just cherry picked the only ones they could find of legal age. I can't believe they only had evidence on two of them.

        The others all had richer, more connected parents.

      • by xaxa ( 988988 )

        The age of criminal responsibility in the UK is 10 in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and 12 in Scotland. (There are ongoing debates over whether the age should be increased.)

        However, it's still possible some younger people were identified but not prosecuted.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Best time to do online shenigans is when you're under 15. seriously.

      because "victims" have to show actual damages and in most jurisdictions it will not show up later on your record + the police don't know how to handle you.

    • by mrmeval ( 662166 )

      Damn what utter and contemptible trade craft. They got...caught. *snicker*

      At least they should have gone up in a pyre of thermite, hard drives and silicon.

      Now they need more silicone to survive jail.

      Not a troll, I'm just damned to pseudo-poetic babbling when disappointed.

       

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:24AM (#40449681)

    Or are they just two of the many who were gullible enough to participate in a LOIC attack and are now presented as the big bad hackers since that's pretty much all we can get our hands at?

    Somehow it smells a bit like presenting a few street dealer busts as the big hit against drug cartels...

    • by Anonymous Coward

      How could it be otherwise, since one of the points about such "anonymous" groups is that there is no leadership.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        No known leadership, you mean. There's no doubt in my mind that, like with any other organisation, there's only a handful of people who take initiative and decide what's going to happen, regardless of whether they're officially leaders or not.

        • Maybe in the same sense that Ashton Kutcher and the Biebs are the leaders of Twitter and, as such, coordinated the protests in the Arab Spring... behind the scenes, of course.
      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Of course there is leadership. Just because they hide behind aliases does not mean they're anonymous. These ringleaders are the inner circle of people who develop the tools, run the chat sites, conspire to attack particular sites, incite others to do likewise, release stolen data and so on. It may be harder to identify these people but it only takes authorities to "turn" one or two of this inner circle to grab the rest.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Correction, they ALSO got the real guys. These are just a few irc tag-alongs they threw in for fun.

    • by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:49AM (#40449799) Journal
      The older people in most groups have be turned at some stage and are free but owned for life, are active undercover assets or can be turned before arrests.
      http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/18/patriot_games [foreignpolicy.com] hints at larger undercover operations in the 1990's surrounding groups in the USA. Infiltration, undercover agents and informants. Go back to the 1960's - no peace or rights group in the community was going to be active without a file.
      The idea that the internet was not going to get the same careful monitoring seems to be based on the hardware needed.
      They just need to bait people with a good story and well meaning site. Skills and names drift in. New informants created, a show trial and promotions enjoyed.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      probably the real thing. i read the story and apparently they had some hacker .SH and .PL scripts on their computers that implicated them as masterminds in the plot to cause havoc on the foreign systems. Very likely they were the kingpins of this operation.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      According to other articles, Cleary ran the Lulzsec IRC server as well as a large botnet that he used to DDoS victims. One of the others that plead not guilty was the infamous 'Kayla', who pretended to be a 16 year old girl but was actually a 25 year old trans-gender.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by detritus. ( 46421 )

      Jake Davis aka Topiary was one ofones who also was involved with cracking [youtube.com] one of Westboro Baptist Church's website during a live interview with the Phelps on the David Pakman show. He was more than the average click-and-run an automated DDoS client.

  • DDoS is Hacking (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TemperedAlchemist ( 2045966 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:59AM (#40449839)

    And making instant noodles is cooking.

    I can't believe their wasting their time to go after these teenage kids. There's plenty more where they came from, and ruining their future is only going to give the pro-lulzsec crowd ammunition. It's a really dumb move, and certainly not what I would do if I were the prosecution. Then again, I'm fairly my having a brain excludes me from being part of those clowns.

    What these people who do their best to take down groups like LulzSec, Anonymous, etc. don't understand is that you can't take them down. This isn't a militia, a terrorist organization, or a code monkey who wants to get back at the work that laid him off: this is an idea, and a very powerful one. Anonymous's very nature is that it is anyone and everyone, there is no centralized network. LulzSec does not elect presidents, and they do not have a chain of command.

    The idea is that individual liberty and the common good is important above all else. Censorship and tyranny stands in the way of this goal, and the only thing these companies are doing is adding fuel to the fire, by proving they're the very entities that need to be stopped.

    The only way anyone could possibly put this to an end is if they arrested and detained every free thinker, anyone who believe in liberty and the free exchange of information, and anyone who won't bend over backwards when Uncle Sam comes to violate our rights and freedoms. We have a word for that, it's called a dystopia.

    • Re:DDoS is Hacking (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @03:25AM (#40449947)
      It's just the classic intimidation method of law enforcement. You can't catch them all, so you just catch a couple, and them utterly destroy their lives in order to make a public example of them. Then that example serves to scare other potential criminals straight.
      • Re:DDoS is Hacking (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Thanshin ( 1188877 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @03:43AM (#40450005)

        Has that method ever worked in the history of mankind?

        Fear doesn't create compliance, just secrecy. And harm (physical or otherwise) doesn't only create fear, but also hate. So they are turning an existing enemy into a better hidden and more hateful enemy. What a fantastic result, they must be proud of their strategical prowess.

        • Re:DDoS is Hacking (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @05:12AM (#40450371) Homepage Journal

          Has that method ever worked in the history of mankind?

          Yes it has, actually. Many people I know would rob banks if they were sure police wouldn't bother to arrest them.

          • by Anonymous Coward

            Um. That's not the same thing at all. We catch most bank robbers. If we only caught 1 in 1000, even if they were summarily executed, people would be robbig banks all the damn time.

        • by qbast ( 1265706 )

          So they are turning an existing enemy into a better hidden and more hateful enemy.

          So? You can't make people love you, but you can definitely make them fear you. And fear is better for control anyway.

        • Yes. It works quite well actually.

    • Re:DDoS is Hacking (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @03:58AM (#40450065) Homepage

      I can't believe their wasting their time to go after these teenage kids. There's plenty more where they came from, and ruining their future is only going to give the pro-lulzsec crowd ammunition. (...) I'm fairly my having a brain excludes me from being part of those clowns. What these people who do their best to take down groups like LulzSec, Anonymous, etc. don't understand is that you can't take them down. This isn't a militia, a terrorist organization, or a code monkey who wants to get back at the work that laid him off: this is an idea, and a very powerful one.

      No, they're the same kind of rebel teenagers that used to do vandalism and tagging and in general rage against the machine when I grew up. They got no plan, no agenda except to strike out randomly and cause mayhem, with gang leaders shouting "let's flip that car" but little more than that, a mindless beast with zero attention span. Script kiddies and their wannabe groupies that would like to be script kiddies are exactly the same in online form, and I don't mind the police giving them a good slap and telling them to grow up. Go back to what you wrote, when did you last see very powerful clowns? Even when they do cause mayhem, they're still just clowns.

    • by oodaloop ( 1229816 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @04:08AM (#40450107)

      Then again, I'm fairly my having a brain excludes me from being part of those clowns.

      I think you accidentally a word.

    • I'm sorry, but you are essentially saying "crime" can't be taken down, as its not a centrally controlled organisation, militia, terrorist organisation - these people, whether part of a larger "organisation" or not, committed a crime and should be punished for it (if found guilty).

      LulzSec, Anonymous etc has got nothing to do with hippy shit like "free thinking" and everything to do with getting away with what they can, when they can - if people purporting to be acting under their banner commit crimes, then t

      • Holy strawman batman! Is that what I said? But I do appreciate you equating a DDoS attack to fire bombing a bus HQ, I like your analogies, very colorful.

    • I can't believe their wasting their time to go after these teenage kids. There's plenty more where they came from, and ruining their future is only going to give the pro-lulzsec crowd ammunition.

      At eighteen and nineteen they are no longer kids.

      It's time the geek stopped making excuses when any of his own are looking at hard time.

      Anonymous's very nature is that it is anyone and everyone, there is no centralized network. LulzSec does not elect presidents, and they do not have a chain of command.

      It is not anyone and everyone.

      The mob has its leaders.

      Those who start the ball rolling and those who keep it in motion.

      Patterns emerge over time. People talk too much. Never more so than when they are in it for lulz. The kick. The drug-like high.

      You are always more exposed, never as anonymous on the Internet, as you think you are,

  • by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @04:37AM (#40450241) Homepage

    18 is a legal adult. These aren't kids, and they knew what they were doing was wrong. They didn't care because, you know, the lulz.

    Should the "real kingpins" be the ones in the dock? Sure. But in the meantime, should these people be held responsible for their actions? Yes, by all means. They were the strong preying on the weak, and if the law doesn't exist to prevent that, then what is its purpose?

  • by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @07:33AM (#40451049) Homepage

    Only a idiot hacks from his home or a place they can identify you from OR you get bloated and start letting people know who you are and you start boasting about your "sploits"

    Hacking 101 stuff. Why are these kiddies not learning the golden rules?

    • The E911 Hacker Crackdown [mit.edu] found that many hackers are compulsive braggers. Something about their personality makes it hard to avoid when someone actually expresses interest (even if it is a police officer who is only interested because he wants to prosecute).
  • It's unfortunate that they will be going to prison for something so worthless. I'm not saying they shouldn't, they broke the law and they knew what they were doing. But we've all see the xkcd comic about it. Their lives will forever be altered and the CIA simply got a headache for a day.
  • They are both adults and should be treated like and expected to act like adults. And, they should receive adult punishment.

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