U.K. police on Wednesday formally charged a 19-year-old teenager with violating the country's computer fraud laws for participating in cyber attacks on various British organizations.
Ryan Cleary violated the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act when he helped organize and carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the U.K.'s Serious Organised Crime Agency, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the Metropolitan Police said.
Cleary was arrested at his home in Essex yesterday; he will appear at the City of Westminster Magistrates Court on Thursday morning.
The 2010 attacks on the IFPI and BPI were reportedly orchestrated by Anonymous offshoot Operation Payback, while the joint Anonymous-LulzSec project known as Operation Anti-Security took credit for the SOCA hack, which happened just this week.
The SOCA Web site is hosted by an external provider and does not contain data from its investigations. Indeed, LulzSec and Anonymous did not post any info from the SOCA site.
Both groups, however, don't appear to have any love for Cleary.
"Ryan Cleary is not part of LulzSec; we house one of our many legitimate chatrooms on his IRC server, but that's it," LulzSec tweeted recently. "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."
LulzSec is "at best, mildly associated" with Cleary, the group said.
Anonymous, meanwhile, got into a battle with Cleary several months ago. In May, the Italian arm of Anonymous said on its blog that Cleary, a "fellow helper," had compromised its network. In a May interview with UK publication Thinq_, Cleary claimed responsiblity for a DDoS on several Anonymous sites, and said he published the IP addresses of users visiting the site when he seized control.
Operation Anti-Security, meanwhile, is humming along. "We're hoping to have Operation Anti-Security Payload #1 ready by Friday," LulzSec tweeted this afternoon.
For more, see PCMag's Guide to Knowing Your Hackers.