Just last week, a member of LulzSec was sentenced for his part in the Sony Pictures hack in 2011 that saw information from the site being spread across the Internet. Now Australia says it’s nabbed another member of the notorious hacking group.
The Australian Federal Police announced yesterday evening that they arrested Matt Flannery, a 24-year-old IT professional from Point Claire. The police allege that he attacked and defaced a government Web site earlier in the month. Interestingly enough, the police also say that he’s a “self-proclaimed leader” of LulzSec.
The police say Flannery used his position within an IT company to hack a number of clients. The police also warned that he would have attacked more Web sites had he stayed employed with the company.
Flannery faces two counts of unauthorized modification of data to cause impairment and one count of unauthorized access to, or modification of, restricted data. The police note that the maximum penalty for the former is 10 years and 2 years for the latter.
What’s interesting about all of this is that the police say he’s a “self-proclaimed leader” of LulzSec. Members of Anonymous and others have come out on Twitter to dispute this claim:
This absolute bullshit great work feds u busted a ddos fag >> Self-proclaimed LulzSec hacking leader arrested in NSW abc.net.au/news/2013-04-2ā¦
— Anonymous Australia (@AuAnon) April 23, 2013
#AFP trying to make this like they cracked the big case yet we dont even know what hack it was some big hecker #lulznot
— Anonymous Australia (@AuAnon) April 24, 2013
Self-proclaimed leader of #Lulzsec in Australia is trolling. Police are dumb.
— K for Kallisti (@Kallisti) April 24, 2013
“He is a well-respected person within the Anonymous community”, said Brad Marden, cyber-crime ops co-ordinator, AFP. Anonymous disagrees.
— Asher Wolf (@Asher_Wolf) April 24, 2013
#BREAKING!!! EXCLUSIVE:We have a picture of the leader of @lulzsec #LulzSec taken 5 minutes ago. twitter.com/AnonymousWWN/sā¦
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNewsKR) April 24, 2013
As an added bonus, Gizmodo AU dug up this video of the alleged LulzSec “leader” singing along to Grease:
[h/t: BBC]