Iraq veteran among hackers sentenced for cyber attacks on CIA, Sony and FBI

An Iraq veteran from South Yorkshire is among a group of computer hackers who were sentenced yesterday for masterminding cyber attacks on major global institutions from their bedrooms.

Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Ryan Cleary saw themselves as ''latter-day pirates'' carrying out attacks on major global institutions, including the CIA, Sony, the FBI and Nintendo.

Ex-soldier Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, who had earlier pleaded guilty to one charge of carrying out an unauthorised act to impair the operation of a computer was awarded 30-month jail sentence.

He posed a 16-year-old girl called Kayla, online.

The four men were ''hactivists'' with the LulzSec collective, the group that carried out attacks stealing sensitive personal data, including emails, online passwords and credit card details belonging to millions of people.

The men also targeted the National Health Service (NHS) and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca). They lived as far apart as London and the Shetland Islands and never met in person.

According to judge Deborah Taylor who sentenced them at Southwark Crown Court in London yesterday, some of their taunting of their victims made for ''chilling reading.''

She said, what they considered a cyber game, in fact, had real consequences.

''You cared nothing for the privacy of others, but did everything you could through your computer activities to hide your own identities while seeking publicity,'' she said.

Working from their bedrooms in 2011, they stole huge amounts of sensitive personal data, including emails, online passwords and credit card details which they posted openly on their website and file-sharing sites like Pirate Bay.

They had also carried out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on many institutions, crashing their websites.

According to prosecutor Sandip Patel, the men lacked the political motivation of groups like Anonymous, from where they had picked up their skills and seemed to be doing it for the kicks.

He said it was clear from the evidence that they intended to achieve extensive national and international notoriety and publicity. They saw themselves as latter-day pirates, he added.

He said this was not about young immature men messing about.
They were at the cutting edge of a contemporary and emerging species of criminal offender known as a cyber criminal, he said.