A 28-year-old British man, Lauri Love, was arrested for hacking into the U.S. government sites and computer systems.
Laurie Love, 28, was arrested in Britain last week under the Computer Misuse Act after a joint investigation by National Crime Agency in U.K. and FBI. He was charged of, 'disrupting the operations and infrastructure of the US government'. However, Love has been granted bail till February as of now, but can face imprisonment up to five year and heavy penalty of $250,000 if the charges are proved to be true, according to various news reports.
The suspected hacking has compromised confidential data of more than 5000 individuals which includes U.S. military personnel, other servicemen and also information on budget, new government ventures and 'demolition and disposal of military facilities', according to the indictment issued by the U.S. district court of New Jersey. The indictment states Love as, "a sophisticated and prolific computer hacker who specialised in gaining access to the computer networks of large organisations, including government agencies, collecting confidential data including personally identifiable information from within the compromised networks, and exfiltrating the data out of the compromised network."
Love was assisted by three more conspirators, two from Australia and one from Sweden reveal the court papers. The hacking took place in between October 2012 to October this year, where the hackers infiltrated in to the systems used by the NASA, the US Missile Defense Agency, the US Army, and the Environmental Protection Agency ,claim the prosecutors, reports BBC.
Love and his co mates used SQL injection attacks to hack the secure government databases. In simpler words the hackers infused a code in to the systems that allowed them to access information on these systems anytime later, claim the court documents.
The documents also cited some of the conversations that took place between Love and his partners in crime. One of the extracts of the chat exposed the real intentions of Love and his Australian co mate - "You have no idea how much we can fuck with the us government if we wanted to. This stuff is really sensitive and it's basically every piece of information you'd need to do full identity theft", said Love.
However, Love has refused to comment on the act and stated, "I can't say anything right now. I only just got home after being at government headquarters today. My dad is ill and my parents both work at the prison so it wouldn't be fair on them to talk about what's going on with all this just at this moment," according to a recent post on Daily Mail.
