14 DAY TRIAL // CWA's leader, a hacker known as Cracka, has been arrested by the UK's South East Regional Organised Crime Unit in East Midlands, England, The Daily Dot reports quoting sources inside the police department.
Cracka was apprehended on Friday, February 12, spent seven hours in jail, and was eventually released on bail. Police raided his home in the morning and confiscated his computer equipment.
Since he is a minor, UK authorities have not released his name, but members of the now-defunct CWA (Crackas With Attitude) hacking crew have unwittingly confirmed on Twitter that the police arrested the right man.
CWA has lots of high-rank US hacks to its name
CWA entered the hacking scene last autumn, when they hacked CIA Director John Brennan's personal AOL email account. In subsequent incidents, the group also hacked FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, US National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and President Barack Obama’s Senior Advisor on science and technology John Holdren.
The group is also responsible for hacking the JABS US national arrests database and for leaking details of 2,400 US government officials, 80 Miami police officers and, more recently, 9,000 DHS employees, and 20,000 FBI staffers.
Police may have been behind the CryptoBin downtime
Rumor has it that, during their most recent data dump, the group committed their first error that led police to Cracka.
The leak was posted on CryptoBin, a text-sharing website similar to PasteBin. Soon after CWA published the data online, CryptoBin went down for a few hours, which was strange since the service has rarely experienced any outages.
Other members of CWA are speculating that Cracka might have forgotten to use his VPN when accessing the site and posting the data, which led UK police back to his real IP and then his real home.
This incident has not deterred other members of the group, and they plan to intensify their hacking efforts. They have not yet released data of DOJ employees, which they said they were also preparing to post online.
Will we stop attacking governments since cracka got arrested? Simple answer: no. In fact, our campaign will only intensify now. — Thwarting exploits (@IncursioSubter) February 12, 2016
Cryptobin went down roughly the same time a member of @dotgovs was "arrested." Do you still think it's coincidental? — Thwarting exploits (@IncursioSubter) February 11, 2016
Before publishing any of the leaks from @dotgovs on pastebin, make sure you're using a VPN or public wifi. @pastebin is known for snitching. — Thwarting exploits (@IncursioSubter) February 11, 2016
Since our arrests seem imminent, I'll be handing myself in tomorrow before I get any surprise visits at my door. #FreePalestine #AuRevoir — Thwarting exploits (@IncursioSubter) February 10, 2016
Either the servers at cryptobin were overwhelmed or the feds shut it down. I'm voting for the latter. — Thwarting exploits (@IncursioSubter) February 10, 2016