Anonymous and LulzSec Members Arrested in the US

The pressure is coming down on hackers, after two alleged members of Anonymous and LulzSec were arrested in the United States.  One Arizona man was arrested for allegedly stealing data from Sony earlier this year, and the other was arrested for allegedly causing damage to a government computer in a separate attack.

Cody Andrew Kretsinger of Phoenix was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy and unauthorised impairment of a protected computer.  The 23 year old man is accused of using proxy servers on the hidemyass.com website as a way to attack Sony computers back in May.

The other case involves Christopher Doyon of Mountain View in California, who allegedly uses the “Commander X” alias.  His case involves a DoS attack on Santa Cruz county servers, which managed to shut down a government website.

Kretsinger is an alleged member of the LulzSec hacker group, which is widely believed to be a spin-off of Anonymous.  LulzSec have not exactly been shy about their involvement in the May Sony attacks, saying this in a post on Pastebin on June 2.

“We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users’ personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts. Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 ‘music codes’ and 3.5 million ‘music coupons.”

The arrest of hackers have been on the increase in recent months, with various members of both LulzSec and Anonymous made to feel the heat.  There were 16 arrests in the United States in July alone, along with more in the United Kingdom and Spain.  However, these numbers are likely to pale in comparison to how many members there really are out there, especially when you consider the fact that no official membership process even exists.