Another LulzSec Member Arrested
hypnosec writes "Raynaldo Rivera, aged 20, suspected member of LulzSec, has been arrested for his alleged role in the breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment last year. The first suspect, Cody Kretsinger, has already pleaded guilty and was indicted last September according to the FBI. Rivera, who also goes by names 'neuron,' 'royal,' and 'wildicv', surrendered to authorities and he has been charged with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. The LulzSec member may be facing 15 years in prison if convicted."
On the member who pleaded guilty: "Kretsinger, who pleaded guilty to the same two charges now facing Rivera, is slated to be sentenced on October 25. A federal prosecutor said he would likely receive substantially less than the 15-year maximum prison term carried by those offenses."
Hopefully with these arrests and others a few months back, the keyboard warriors out there will start to realise that they're not untraceable and can't just do as they damn well please on the internet.
I'm no fan of Sony but I hope this guy is banged up for a long time for stealing all that private data. And before any wannabe heros mod me down you might want to consider that YOUR data could be part of it.
I wonder if that's another arrest they made thanks to Sabu's cooperation, if so, that coop was the best thing the FBI could have done in this whole mess of so-called "hacktivism"
Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich
Hmm.. hate to break it to you but there ARE ways to be untraceable.. just like any criminal who gets bored they also get sloppy and hence getting caught.
Keep believing that. Report back here in five years to see if you are right.
Raynaldo Rivera, aged 20, suspected member of Lulzsec has been arrested ....
charged with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer. The Lulzsec member may be facing 15 years in prison if convicted....
accused of hacking Sony Pictureâ(TM)s Web site in June 2011 through use of SQL injection attack and downloading thousands of records containing names, birth dates, addresses, e-mails, phone numbers, and passwords. The hacker after posting all the data onto Pastebin, announced the hack through a tweet.....
"Hey @Sony, you know we're making off with a bunch of your internal stuff right now and you haven't even noticed?"
The hacking collective claimed that they had managed to grab information of more than a million people whereas Sony countered the claims saying that only 37k records were actually stolen.
there is no sense of proportion here, it's not justice. Maybe it is the people, whose records were stolen, that should be outraged, not Sony, Sony as a company should be humble about it and do whatever to mitigate the problem their lack of interest in security may have caused.
But because large corporations like Sony are in bed with large governments, there will be no justice. Sure, send these guys to prison for 15 years because a company is outraged. How about company's clients?
My point is - this is none of government's business, it is up to the market to solve theft crimes. If these guys caused damage to private individuals, private individuals should take them to court (and maybe they should take Sony to court), but this has nothing to do with government, why is government throwing these people to jail?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
There is a different.
We have Anonymous and LulzSec as partially organized organizations. There is a particular group of criminals that can do the attack on.
The "War On Drugs" is trying to stop the supply of a product that is in demand. The US can crack down on the big Drug Lords, but won't stop the flow of drugs because there will always be the smaller ones shipping the same product.
Big attacks like Anonymous and LulzSec have a loose organization structure going enough to get a targeted attack... That means the government once they put their mind to it, can start kicking off these hackers. These people are petty criminals, not Hero's. Once people realize that they could get caught hacking, such large attacks should reduce down, because there is more risk in this type of vandalism.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Pleaded at the quality of the proofreading as usual. Keep up the good work, editors.
"When one rapist falls, three more will rise to take his/her place", So lets declare surrender and stop wasting money capturing them. What dump mentality these days
really...come on really, was it that "protected" ?
Where one falls, three more will rise to take his/her place. Locking up LulzSec will be an exercise in futility much like the American "War On Drugs"
No, that was never true. LulzSec was too closed an operation to say such things, especially after they pissed off lots of Anonymites. In the end everyone hated the douche bags, and no one wants to carry their Flaming Asshole Torch.
I was surprised to see they are still making arrests. I had expected all those involved were already in federal "pound me in the ass" prisons. Obviously I overestimated our law enforcement.
A better analogy would be terrorism and how killing a few insurgents in an attack only angers the civilians who are often collateral damage, and thus for each insurgent killed 3 more rise up.
This is not about file sharing or fun or teenage rebellion. This is about freedom and privacy. Remember when Sony went after Geohot and in doing so, tried to establish a precedent that what they sell you remains their property and you aren't free to use it privately any way you want? Remember when the RIAA and MPAA pushed for SOPA because their profits were more important than our right to online privacy? Remember when they tried to acquire the power to censor ANY website if they simply accused it of being infringing on some copyright, thus threatening freedom of speech? Remember when they tried to make linking to stuff illegal? Remember when the DOJ seized all these domains without a trial "because piracy" and many were found innocent? Remember the "pay up or else letters" that were ultimately ruled to be extortion? Remember the dirty stuff that the Wikileaks documents uncovered about the US government and many corporations?
These are the things people are fighting against today. It affects everybody, so everyone and anyone has the potential to join the fight. And then you have to take into account that teenagers today were born with the Internet, file-sharing technology seems natural to them and they will never understand why artists have to keep making millions when anyone can record a song and sell it online or why there has to be a publisher standing between the customer and the artist and who is leeching most of the money. They also won't understand different release dates around the world, DRM, lack of availability for music and movies, prices above $1 for a song, etc. They will never understand any of that, just like today's 40 year olds would never understand having to pay a fee every time they ask a stranger for directions in the street. A lot of people disagree with file-sharing - I get that. But the point is, you will never convince the younger generations to see it differently.
As for going after members of Anonymous and Lulzsec, it just angers people further. They might not agree with Lulzsec's methods, but Lulzsec does try to defend these people's interests. So these people, they will take anything done against Lulzsec as an attempt to violate their rights, freedom and privacy further.
So in light of all this, I agree, I think it's very likely that for every Lulzsec member taken down, 3 will take his place.
Clearly the work of Anonymous!
You coward.
Click box to protect my secret identity.
I'd like to know where you get your figures. I would think that having been shown the very real risks of a lengthy stretch on prison, you'll find those willing to 'replacing' those who 'fall' are in the decline.
There will always be criminals, does that making locking up criminals futile? Should we just give up on doing that?
The "War On Drugs" is an example of what happens when you try to legislate against market demand. There is a demand for drugs, there will always be those willing to sell to that market. On the other hand, there is no market demand for self-righteous, self-appointed internet vigilantes.
SQL injections? You mean those things I learned from YouTube when I was 12?
No, SQL injection IS WHAT YOU ARE, little Bobby Tables!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In the US, generally the maximum penalty for killing someone is death, which I think most agree is more severe than 15 years.
As a matter of course, most people convicted of killing someone else don't get the death penalty, and neither is this man is likely to face 15 years in prison. Those are both the maximum penalty.
Depending on the type of killing, more than 15 years can be the minimum. For example the federal sentencing for 1st degree (premeditated) murder is a minimum of life without parole, maximum of the death penalty. States tend to be similar. For second degree murder it varies, but life sentences are usually allowed. For example you may hear the expression "25 to life". What that means is a life sentence, but with the allowance for parole at 25 years.
The only cases where killing someone starts to have less severe sentences is manslaughter and negligent homicide. These are cases where you caused someone's death, but didn't mean to. Since intent matters in the law, punishments are less severe in cases like that.
Next time, embezzle a few billion bucks from pension accounts, you pay a few millions back as "punishment" and go out as a rich and free man.
While it made me laugh, you should add that they should first get a white collar job or at least take the exams to become a licensed stockbroker.
That's where the free pass comes from: Whether you're associated with a mainstream "business" or not.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
This post was brought to you by the FBI.
They give pro (facist / police state / surveillance / corporate) forces the perfect justification to slowly destroy the most important source of freedom and information since the printing press: the Internet.
I just hope some of the wiser ones will still be around to help fight the forces of evil (and that ain't a video game console company, FFS).
Would he be facing the same 15 years if he hacked into Bob's Computer Shack's servers? Or do they consider it more severe because sony has more money and more clients? Is there some equation they use that determines "you stole this much data, so you do this many years in prison" ?
Most of the sentences these days that have to do with computer related crimes seem outrageous.
I'd understand if it got people killed. But what Sony has is banking information. Most banks have mechanisms to mitigate damage ( I used to play a tank in WoW - Dwarf warrior, so gangster) in the case where your money/information is stolen. They will reissue your card, give you new account numbers, whatever it takes. Sony shouldn't have private information like SSNs, so I'm not too sure what everyone is worried about. Unless you're afraid Lulzsec is selling your home address to that kid you kept calling a fgt on COD and he's actually gonna kill you like he was screaming he would.
What should happen is something like this:
Dear Sony Customer,
We left our gaping hole exposed and we lost your data.
Here are the details that you should be worried about and
that you'll need to provide to your bank. Please check your shit.
Sorry we fucked up, keep buying our crap.
Hugs and Kisses,
Sony Entertainment
But it won't, because they want to play the victim. Shit, if Lulzsec got it, some other hacking group probably had it before them and have been buying viagra on your cards for months.
Anyway, there's my daily rant. Windows Sucks, Linux Rules, OPEN SOURCE FOR LIFE!!!
Fuck you, racist. Ethnicity did not help Bernie Madoff, and it didn't hurt John Corzine. The justice system is biased in favor of wealth and power, not ethnicity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That is a great way to go through life, and of course always works out well for everyone. One hell of a lot of blodd has been shed over time because of people with that idiotic philosophy.
Hopefully with these arrests and others a few months back, the keyboard warriors out there will start to realise that they're not untraceable and can't just do as they damn well please on the internet.
I'm no fan of Sony but I hope this guy is banged up for a long time for stealing all that private data. And before any wannabe heros mod me down you might want to consider that YOUR data could be part of it.
I agree they went too far and I hate Sony too. I don't think revealing user data served the purposes of Anonymous in any way and if anything made Anonymous look like the bad guys and helped the opposition gain political cover to attack Anonymous and everything Anonymous was trying to do politically.
I definitely believe criminal activity should be punished but sending in prison a 20-year old for 15 whole fucking years and treating him as if he is a war criminal or serial killer, for simply hacking into a computer of a multi-billion-dollar company (which as it seems didn't care to invest some of it's awfully lot of money in protecting it's customer's data) , is a little too much. Especially when at the same time there are other criminals out there who roam free thanks to their financial status.
But it doesn't matter. His life is destroyed now and honestly you can thank Sabu for playing informant and helping to destroy it.
He can also thank himself for being an idiot.
I wonder if that's another arrest they made thanks to Sabu's cooperation, if so, that coop was the best thing the FBI could have done in this whole mess of so-called "hacktivism"
The thing here is it's not like Sabu is the good guy. Sabu is the worst of the worst here because he ruined the lives of the people who trusted him with their lives. Hackers are motivated by money, ideology, coercion or contraband and ego. This is the MICE motivation and in general all human beings are motivated the same way.
So in this case it's not money because these hackers weren't being paid. It was either IDEOLOGY or EGO. What that means is most of these young adults were brainwashed, or psychologically manipulated, probably by Sabu and people like him who also happened to be informants for the FBI. That is what sucks about tihs, we will never really know how many of these kids would never have got involved if Sabu hadn't influenced them. Sabu had no problem sacrificing his ideology for his ego as he threw Lulzsec under the bus for the FBI. Let's just accept that Sabu is a scumbag even by cyber criminal standards.
For the record I don't endorse Lulzsec, I think they were a bunch of idiots and my posts reflect that. Being an idiot shouldn't mean 15 years in prison, that is a political sentencing and I disagree with that. I also disagree with what Sabu did on a personal level, as he was a bad person, a rotten human being, but this has nothing to do with what he did on a professional level which may have actually put an end to Lulzsec.