He has been sentenced to serve a community order for the child abuse images

Jun 12, 2013 13:37 GMT  ·  By

LulzSec hacker Ryan Cleary, known on the hacking scene as ViraL, will be released soon. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison back in May after admitting to his involvement in cyberattacks against several high-profile organizations.

He has already served over half of his sentence – one year, six months and 18 days, to be more precise – which makes him eligible for release, the Guardian notes.

Cleary’s release is imminent, despite the fact that investigators identified 172 child abuse images on his computer.

For this offence, the judge sentenced the hacker to serve community orders. He will be banned from using the Web to talk to anyone under 16, and his online access in general will be heavily restricted.

He is not allowed to work with children, and he has been placed on the offenders’ register for 5 years.

His lawyer argued that he was not a pervert. Instead, he pointed out that all the child abuse images were downloaded in a single session, this action being triggered by the fact that the youth suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.

He allegedly visited the illegal website because he wanted to see everything the Web had to offer.