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Friday, March 29, 2024 | Back issues
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LulzSec Hacker Gets Year|in Prison for Sony Attack

(CN) - A second member of the hacking group LulzSec was sentenced Thursday to one year and one day in federal prison for his role in a computer attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Raynaldo Rivera, 21, of Chandler, Ariz., also must serve 13 months of home detention, perform 1,000 hours of community service and pay $605,663 in restitution.

Prosecutors said the 2011 attack compromised Sony's computer systems and resulted in the personal information of more than 138,000 people being posted online.

Rivera, known by the online moniker "neuron," pleaded guilty last October to conspiring to cause damage to a protected computer, according to the U.S. attorney.

LulzSec's purported goal in the attack, according to court documents, was to see the "raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy" and to provide stolen personal data "so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it."

Rivera's sentence is almost identical to that of fellow LulzSec member Cody Andrew Kretsinger, known online as "recursion," who was sentenced in April to a year and day in prison.

Rivera and Kretsinger both studied at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Ariz. Prosecutors said Kretsinger recruited Rivera to join LulzSec, known for its affiliation with the amorphous hacking collective Anonymous.

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," prosecutors said in a sentencing memo.

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