British police charged a 19-year-old man with cybercrime offences on Wednesday, Scotland Yard said, following his arrest in connection with an international hacking group. Ryan Cleary will appear in court in central London on Thursday to face five charges including that he hacked the website of Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), it said in a statement.
The young man "has this afternoon been charged with offences under the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act by officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's Police Central e-Crime Unit," it said. Police have previously said Cleary was arrested on Monday in a raid on his home in Wickford, south-east England, for alleged links to the Lulz Security group, following co-operation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Lulz has claimed responsibility for a month-long rampage against international businesses and government agencies, including SOCA, the CIA and Senate in the United States and electronics giant Sony. Scotland Yard said Cleary was charged with targeting the SOCA website on Monday with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks overwhelm websites with requests, causing them to be slow or inaccessible.
He was charged with similar attacks on the website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in November and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) on October, it said.
Cleary faces two further charges of creating a "botnet" or network of computers to carry out DDoS attacks. British media reports quoted his mother Rita as saying that Cleary had agoraphobia and attention deficit disorder. She said he was an introverted young mann who "lives his life online. Lulz issued Twitter postings overnight denying that Cleary was part of the group.
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