Second Hacker Sentenced In Sony Pictures Cyber Attack
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A second member of an Arizona-based hacking group was sentenced to a year in federal prison for his role in an major computer attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment , prosecutors said Thursday.
In addition to the prison sentence, Raynaldo Rivera, 21, of Chandler, Arizona, was ordered Rivera to serve 13 months of home detention, to perform 1,000 hours of community service and to pay $605,663 in restitution, according to André Birotte of the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Rivera, known by the online moniker "neuron," of the LulzSec hacking group, pleaded guilty last October to conspiring to cause damage to a protected computer in the 2011 attack that resulted in personal information of more than 138,000 people being posted on the Internet.
According to court documents, Lulzsec's goal in the attacks on Sony Pictures and other corporate and government entities was to see the "raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy" and to provide stolen personal information "so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it."
Another member of LulzSec, Cody Andrew Kretsinger, who used the online moniker "recursion," was sentenced in April to one year and one day in federal prison.
In addition to the prison term, U.S. District Judge John A. Kronstadt ordered Kretsinger to serve one year of home detention following the completion of his prison sentence, to perform 1,000 hours of community service, and to pay $605,663 in restitution.
Rivera and Kretsinger studied together at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona.
Kretsinger first joined LulzSec, and then he recruited Rivera to join the group, prosecutors said.
Rivera, Kretsinger and others involved in the intrusion obtained confidential information from Sony Pictures' computer systems by using an "SQL injection" attack against Sony Pictures' website.
The attackers distributed the stolen data on the Internet, information that included names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses for tens of thousands of Sony customers, according to prosecutors.
LulzSec is known for its affiliation with "Anonymous," which is a loose collective of computer hackers and others around the world who conduct cyber attacks and disseminate confidential information stolen from victims' computers.
In 2011, LulzSec engaged in "a two-month rampage of cyber attacks against various corporate and government entities in the United States and the United Kingdom," according to a sentence memorandum filed by prosecutors.
