"LulzSec suspect" arrested in Scotland Yard, FBI swoop
The UK Metropolitan Police has confirmed that its Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) has arrested a 19-year-old man in a pre-planned intelligence-led operation.
While Naked Security is reporting that the arrest has been made in connection to the recent spate of LulzSec attacks, the LulzSec Twitter account posted the following in response to the news:
"Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it's all over now... wait... we're all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?"
According to the Ars Technica, the suspect Ryan Cleary is a former member of Anonymous and 808chan associate, who dared to hack Anonymous's own IRC server when parting ways with the hacktivst group.
The Met issued a press release today, saying, "The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group.
"The teenager was arrested on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act, and Fraud Act offences and was taken to a central London police station, where he currently remains in custody for questioning.
"Searches at a residential address in Wickford, Essex, following the arrest last night have led to the examination of a significant amount of material. These forensic examinations remain ongoing."
The PCeU was assisted by officers from Essex Police and have been working in co-operation with the FBI.
Scotland Yard has told Develop that it would "examine the individual for any Sony data," confirming the arrest was made in relation to the PSN outage caused back in April.
The LulzSec hacking group has recently been responsible for bring down EVE Online, League of Legends and other games-related services and companies, as well as apparently hacking the CIA and, only this morning, the UK Census.
LulzSec's action are merely the latest in a year plagued by covert web activity against games firms, with the coup de grâce being an intrusion into PSN's data in April that took the service offline for a month.