A Tempe, Arizona man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly taking part in the June 2011 attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.’s network, in which passwords and other personal data was stolen from one million user accounts.
Raynaldo Rivera, 20, was charged with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protected computer, which could earn him up to 15 years in prison if he is found guilty. He was ordered to appear in a Los Angeles courtroom Sept. 14.
Another LulzSec member, Cody Kretsinger, 24, also of Tempe, was arrested last year and pleaded guilty in April to similar charges related to the same attack. He’s scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 25.
The pair are believed to be part of the hacking collective that breached Sony Pictures computers last summer and then boasted about a one-million-account bounty; Sony said less than 38,000 users actually had personal information stolen.
The Associated Press and other news agencies said Rivera, who went by the handles “wildicv,” “neuron” and “royal,” allegedly breached Sony’s database using a SQL injection attack and then posted confidential information on its Web site.
LulzSec members then boasted about the attack on Twitter. “From a single injection we accessed EVERYTHING. Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?” the group posted after the Sony attack.
Federal authorities also say Rivera used a proxy server to try to evade detection.
This week’s arrest follows news that last week 28-year-old former ringleader Hector Monsegur, a.k.a. “Sabu,” who pleaded guilty to helping break into several high-profile Web sites, was granted a six-month delay in his sentencing as a reward for helping authorities hunt down other hackers involved in various, and often high-profile, cybercrimes. He faces up to 124 years in prison when he is now scheduled to be sentenced in February 2013.
After he was caught, Monsegur, who lives in New York, is said to have helped the FBI while still leading the hacking collective for about six months. His assistance, authorities said, to date has helped in the eventual arrests of six other men allegedly tied to LulzSec and Antisec, both offshoots of the larger hacking enclave known as Anonymous.
