A 19-year-old alleged member of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups has been arrested in the UK. The Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit announced that Ryan Cleary, of Wickford, Essex, was arrested last night on suspicion of offenses under the Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act. He's currently being held in a central London police station.
Cleary was responsible for running one of the IRC servers used by AnonOps, a faction of the Anonymous group that co-ordinated attacks on both perceived "enemies" of WikiLeaks and various Middle Eastern governments, until an acrimonious split last month. Subsequently, he is believed to have been a member of Lulz Security, responsible for running that group's IRC server.
The police, working in co-ordination with the FBI, have seized a "significant amount" of material from Cleary's address which is now undergoing forensic examination.
LulzSec, for its part, is denying that any member of their group has been arrested, wondering which "poor bastard" had been taken in. However, their IRC server is offline, which would be consistent with claims that it was operated by Cleary.
Concurrent with this, a post made to Pastebin that purports to be a LulzSec press release claims that the group has stolen the data collected in the UK's recent census. The post claims that the data will be published once it has been suitably formatted. Collecting the data was outsourced to defense contractor Lockheed Martin—itself the victim of recent attacks. Speaking to Channel 4 News, a spokesperson for the census claimed that there was "no evidence" to suggest that the data had been compromised.
LulzSec this morning sought to distance itself from the census claims. The group pointed out that anyone can paste the Lulz Boat ASCII art into Pastebin, and said that only releases that were promoted via Twitter should be trusted. There was no tweet publicizing the census post.
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