Two Irish men were among five arrested as part of investigations into the LulzSec hacking team today. Police in Ireland, the US and UK have taken a total of five men into custody on the foot of information supplied by LulzSec’s alleged ringleader Hector Xavier Monsegur (28), aka Sabu, who was arrested last June.
According to Fox News Darren "Pwnsauce" Martyn and Donncha "Palladium" O’Cearrbhail have been taken into custody. Also indicted so far are Jake "Topiary" Davis and Ryan "Kayla" Ackroyd of London; and Jeremy "Anarchaos" Hammond of Chicago, who has also been charged in connection with operations by hacktivist collective Anonymous. Davis, a 19-year-old diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, has been under house arrest since August.
The FBI’s operation to dismantle LulzSec dates back to August 15 2011 when Monsegur, an unemployed father of two, was unmasked as Sabu. Since then he operated out of FBI offices tasked with taking down the other leaders of LulzSec and hacktivists from Anonymous.
During LulzSec’s brief existance it attacked the websites of the CIA, Fox, Sony and global intelligence company Stratfor, posting confidential information to the website Pastebin and causing billions in damage and harming Sony’s reputation to the extent that it has had to rebrand its online gaming service to distance itself from the fallout from the security breach.
A long-term welfare recipient, Monsegur’s last full time job was with peer-to-peer music sharing service Limewire. The company went under in 2010, helped in no small part by a €100 million lawsuit by the Recording Industry Association of America.
LulzSec officially ceased operations in June 2011 citing boredom rather than intervention by law enforcement agencies as the reason for calling it quits.
As for the Irish arrests, Darren Martyn is the "founder and main researcher" of Insecurity Research and studied at NUI Galway. In January he gave a talk on wireless security at information security conference CampusCon, organised by the Waterford IT Hacking Society. Details of O’Cearrbhail’s background are pending confirmation.
The Garda Press Office has confirmed it is holding one person for questionning.
TechCentral Reporters
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers