6:27 p.m. | Updated with additional comments from prosecutors and the defendant.
Jeremy Hammond of Chicago, a member of the Lulzsec hacking collective, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to attack a global intelligence firm.
As a crowd of supporters watched, Mr. Hammond, 28, pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking.
Chicago Police Department, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty to hacking charges.
Mr. Hammond was arrested last year with the help of Hector Xavier Monsegur, the hacker better known by his hacking moniker Sabu. Mr. Monsegur was arrested and subsequently helped law-enforcement officials infiltrate Lulzsec, an offshoot of Anonymous, the loose hacking collective that has supported an ever-shifting variety of causes, ranging from democracy in the Middle East to justice for victims of sexual crimes.
Officials accused Lulzsec of defacing Web sites, stealing confidential information and putting victims temporarily out of business. Mr. Hammond was arrested in connection with a breach of the company Stratfor Global Intelligence Service and charged with stealing credit card information and using some of it to make more than $700,000 in fraudulent charges.
The authorities had managed, with Mr. Monsegur’s help, to persuade Mr. Hammond and Stratfor’s other attackers to use one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s own computers to store data stolen from Stratfor. The hackers complied and transferred “multiple gigabytes of confidential data,” including 60,000 credit card numbers, records for 860,000 Stratfor clients, employees’ e-mails and financial data to the F.B.I.’s computers, according to the complaint against Mr. Hammond.
Many of those e-mails later appeared on Wikileaks.
Mr. Hammond told Judge Loretta A. Preska of Federal District Court in Manhattan that in 2011 and 2012 he had gained unauthorized access to Stratfor’s computer systems and several other groups, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Virtual Academy, the public safety department in Arizona, and Vanguard Defense Industries, which makes drones.
“As part of each of these hacks I took and disseminated confidential information,” Mr. Hammond told the judge. “I knew what I was doing was against the law.”
Later, Mr. Hammond issued a statement saying that he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hack Stratfor, partly to avoid the possibility of being charged with hacking groups other than Stratfor.
“Now that I have pleaded guilty it is a relief to be able to say that I did work with Anonymous,” Mr. Hammond wrote in a statement on a Web site run by his supporters. “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors.”
In a written statement, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said, “While he billed himself as fighting for an anarchist cause, in reality, Jeremy Hammond caused personal and financial chaos for individuals whose identities and money he took and for companies whose businesses he decided he didn’t like.”
Mr. Hammond faces up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors said, and has agreed to pay up to $2.5 million in restitution.
Before his arrest last year, Mr. Hammond had already served 24 months in prison for hacking into a political group’s computer server and stealing credit card numbers in 2006.
Judge Preska said that Mr. Hammond will be sentenced in September.
Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/lulzsec-hacker-pleads-guilty/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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