A hacker known online as Recursion has been sentenced to a year in jail after he hacked Sony Picture Entertainment in 2011.
The 25-year-old Cody Kretsinger will spend a year in jail, but after that he will also have to complete 1,000 hours of community service after a guilty verdict was ruled by a Los Angeles judge.
Kretsinger actually pleaded guilty to the crime last April, admitting he was part of a hacking group known as Lulzsec, who emerged as a splinter group of the Anonymous hackers in May 2011.
The Sony Pictures Entertainment hack occurred in July 2011, when the website was breached to access a database of customer information listing names, address, emails and phone numbers. Around 50,000 of the customers’ details were then leaked online by the hacker now identified as Kretsinger.
It is unknown whether Kretsinger co-operated with authorities in a plea bargain to gain sentence leniency, but he pleaded guilty and was charged with conspiracy and unauthorised impairment of a protected computer.
Other Lulzsec hackers recently pleaded guilty to crimes in court, including 26-year-old Ryan Ackroyd who admitted targeting the NHS and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) in the UK.
Ackroyd and three other hackers are due to be sentenced next month in British courts.
A month ago it was also revealed that hacker Hector Xavier Monsegur, known online as Sabu, had co-operated with American authorities to give up the names of a number of Lulzsec members.
The hacking group previously used distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to render websites unusable, forcing high traffic to pass through sites until they could no longer cope with the demand.
Claiming to have hacked The Sun newspaper’s website, Lulzsec said it posted a story professing the CEO of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch had in fact died. In the US the group claims to have attacked the CIA website and have posted a story on PBS telling fans Tupac Shakur, a dead rapper, was still alive.
Via: BBC
