Brit Arrested For “Pwning” US Government, Tripped Up By Named Paypal Account…
A British man threatened to “pwn” US government web services before uploading a mocking video to a government website, and stealing the personal details of FBI agents, court documents allege.
Lauri Love, 28, of Suffolk, was arrested yesterday morning under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK’s National Crime Agency and was released on bail until February 2014. The former Glasgow University student is the son of a vicar in Suffolk, the Telegraph reports. The Mail says that Mr Love was a leading member of the Occupy movement who carried out his sophisticated attacks from his parents’ house.
Mr Love operating through the alias “shift” said he wanted to “pwn” the US government and “drop a bomb” on its websites an FBI agent alleges in court documents supporting the arrest warrant.
The court documents describe a year-long campaign against the US government services starting on Christmas Eve 2012, when Mr Love and several unidentified co-conspirators allegedly broke into several sites by exploiting a weakness in Adobe Coldfusion. After gaining access through the glitch, Love built backdoors into the US servers.
The FBI started to track down Mr Love after his name was linked to the hacks through a named paypal account. The hackers used a public webdomain as an access point to the backdoors built into the government servers. The site was paid for with Mr Love’s Paypal account, linked to a gmail with his name in it. The FBI were also able to work out Mr Love’s Suffolk address through his Paypal.
Mr Love is charged with being behind the hack of the US Sentencing Commission site – getting it to display a video that criticized its own laws on internet crime – and taking the site down for three weeks. He is also accused with stealing thousands of personal details – phone numbers and email addresses of government workers including FBI agents.
British police arrested Mr Love under the Computer Misuse Act, under which individuals can be arrested for launching attacks from within the UK against computers anywhere in the world.
If he is found guilty, Mr Love faces up to 5 years in jail and fines of $250,000 per charge.
Posted: 29th, October 2013 | In: Technology Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
