LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond pleads guilty to Stratfor hack

Jeremy "anarchaos" Hammond, LulzSec member and self-styled activist, announced today that he's pleading guilty to one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Hammond admits that he worked with Anonymous to hack into the website of private intelligence company Stratfor as well as other sites involved in the law enforcement and intelligence sphere. He says he acted because he believes "people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors." Some five million e-mails between the company and its clients were given to WikiLeaks, which has in turn published slightly more than 900,000 of them.

This attack was part of the "AntiSec" (Anti-Security) operation started by LulzSec in June 2011. That initiative saw numerous law enforcement and intelligence organizations attacked.

Hammond pled not guilty to the charges about one year ago. He says he changed his plea because the prosecutor "stacked the charges with inflated damage figures." These high damage figures mean that under current sentencing guidelines Hammond faced more than 30 years in prison if found guilty.

Further, with other indictments outstanding against him, Hammond says that even if he won one trial, further trials were likely to occur.

Under the terms of the plea agreement, Hammond will be given immunity from further prosecution in federal courts. He still faces up to 10 years in prison for the charge he admitted to, as Hammond supporters argue that he should be sentenced to no more than time served. The LulzSec man already spent 15 months in prison awaiting trial. Sentencing is scheduled to take place on September 6. Hammond has also agreed to pay $250,000 in restitution.

Hammond broke into Statfor's systems in late 2011. After doing so, he got in touch with LulzSec ringleader Hector "Sabu" Monsegur to discuss the hack, using Monsegur's servers to store the data.

The e-mails were given to WikiLeaks. Other information—including e-mail addresses, hashed passwords, and around 30,000 credit card numbers—was published online. Subsequent to the hack, some $700,000 in unauthorized charges was made to the stolen cards.

What Hammond didn't know at the time was that Monsegur had been arrested earlier that year and was secretly working as an FBI informant. The offer of storage space for the purloined data came at the FBI's request. The FBI used information from Hammond's chats with Sabu, including mentions of previous arrests, to determine his identity.

Earlier in the month, four LulzSec members in the UK were sentenced to between 24 and 32 months for their parts in the group's hacking activities. Two group members in Ireland were arrested but subsequently released, with prosecutors there declining to press charges.

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Lulzsec hackers to be sentenced for cyber attacks on the CIA and Pentagon

A court has heard that four UK-based hackers involved with the Lulzsec group thought of themselves as being "modern-day pirates".

Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Cleary have all pleaded guilty to hacking offences.

Cleary has also pleaded guilty to possession of images showing child abuse, which were found by police on his hard drive.

The men will be sentenced at Southwark Crown Court later this week.

Lulzsec carried out a series of attacks in 2011. Targets included Sony Pictures, video games maker EA, the News International media group and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

'International notoriety'

Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, has admitted stealing data from Sony. The former soldier was also responsible for redirecting visitors trying to visit the Sun newspaper's site to a fake story about News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch committing suicide.

He has pleaded guilty to carrying out an unauthorised act to impair the operation of a computer.

Bassam, 18, from south London, Davis, 20, from Lerwick, Shetland, and Cleary, 21, from Wickford, Essex, all pleaded guilty to two charges - hacking and launching cyber-attacks against organisations including the CIA and Soca.

In addition, Cleary pleaded guilty to a further four charges, including hacking into the US Air Force's computers and possession of indecent images of babies and children.

Prosecutor Sandip Patel said that unlike the others, Cleary was not a core member of Lulzsec although he had wanted to be.

"It's clear from the evidence that they intended to achieve extensive national and international notoriety and publicity," he said.

"This is not about young immature men messing about. They are at the cutting edge of a contemporary and emerging species of criminal offender known as a cybercriminal."

Judge Deborah Taylor will sentence the men after considering mitigating factors highlighted by their lawyers.

Cleary's lawyer said his client suffered from Asperger's syndrome, which had been misdiagnosed as attention deficit disorder.

Botnet attack

Lulzsec's name is combination of the acronym Lol - meaning laugh out loud - and security.

It emerged as a splinter-group from the hacking collective Anonymous two years ago.

Mr Patel said the spin-off lacked the "libertarian" political agenda of the larger group. Instead, its stated goal was to laugh at others' flawed security measures "just because we could".

This involved stealing emails, credit card details and passwords from their targets' computer servers and crashing victim's websites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This involved flooding organisations' web servers with requests sent from hijacked computers used as part of a botnet.

Lulzsec's original ringleader is alleged to be another man - US-based Hector Monsegur, also known as Sabu. He was arrested in June 2011 and later co-operated with the FBI to help it identify other members of Lulzsec. Monsegur has yet to be sentenced.

A 24-year-old Australian has also been arrested and accused of attacking and defacing a government website as part of Lulzsec's campaign.

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