Hacker Arrested for Compromising Federal Employee and Service Member Info

There's a good chance federal authorities enjoyed arresting Lauri Love, a 28-year-old British man accused of hacking into multiple government agencies over the last year to steal confidential employee information in order to publish it.

New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman announced the arrest in a statement Monday. Love is charged with one count of "accessing a U.S. department or agency computer without authorization and one count of conspiring to do the same." The U.S. attorney's office says Love faces "five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gross gain or loss from the offense, on each of the two counts with which he is charged." He was arrested Friday at his home in Stradishall, England by the British Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency (NCA) after a long investigation with help from the FBI, according to theNew Jersey Star-Ledger. 

Love and his merry band of compu-anarchist co-conspirators have been hacking multiple U.S. government agencies, including NASA and the Missile Command Agency, since October 2012 up until this month. The group was using secure servers, sometimes ones on the notorious Tor network, to launch attacks on multiple government networks. Once inside, Love and his team would leave "back door" malware code behind, allowing them to reenter the government networks with relative ease. The team coordinated their attacks in secure online chat rooms.

Or, so they thought.

Read the rest at TheAtlanticWire.com.

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