UK Teenager Charged for LulzSec Attack on SOCA and Others

A UK teenager arrested earlier this week has been officially charged in connection with LulzSec and Anonymous attacks against the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).

Ryan Cleary, 19, of Wickford, Essex, was charged yesterday with four offenses under the Computer Misuse Act and one under the Criminal Law Act. Cleary is believed to be a former Anonymous member affiliated with LulzSec.

First of all, authorities claim that Cleary was responsible for building a botnet designed to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks.

This botnet doesn't appear to refer to the DDoS "hivemind" that Anonymous members form voluntarily by running a special program called LOIC on their machines.

Cleary is charged with conducting "unauthorised modification of computers by constructing and distributing a computer program to form a network of computers (a Botnet)."

He is also accused of using the said botnet to launch attacks against the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Both organizations are based in the UK and are known to have been targeted by Anonymous on repeated occasions.

Despite LulzSec claiming that Cleary is not one of its members and not involved in its activities, he was charged for an attack attributed to the hacking group.

"On 20th June 2011 [Cleary] did an unauthorised act namely a Distributed Denial of Service attack against the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency," the charge reads.

On June 20 LulzSec announced from their Twitter feed: "Tango down - soca.gov.uk - in the name of #AntiSec. Later we'll unleash fire on multiple targets."

After Cleary's arrest, the group said: "We use Ryan's server, we also use Efnet, 2600, Rizon and AnonOps IRC servers. That doesn't mean they're all part of our group. Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they've gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us."