A 26 year-old hacker whose targets included the NHS and CIA, has pleaded guilty to computer hacking.
Ryan Ackroyd, from South Yorkshire, was due to face trial for taking part in a string of cyber-attacks, but today pleaded guilty to one charge of carrying out an unauthorised act to impair the operation of a computer, contrary to the Criminal Law Act 1977.
He and three others on similar charges were part of a group known as Lulzsec and will be sentenced next month. The South Yorkshireman will not, however, face trial for operating a distributed denial of service (DoS) attack, which will remain on file.
Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, from South London, and 20 year-old Jake Davis from Shetland, have also pleaded guilty to hacking and launching cyber-attacks. Associate Ryan Cleary, 21, from Essex, pleaded last year to six charges including hacking into US Air Force Agency computers at the Pentagon.
The members of Lulzsec split from the hacking collective Anonymous two years ago. The name is short for Lulz Security – in which "Lulz" is derived from "lol" (laugh out loud). They employed techniques to inundate websites with high traffic to render them unusable – known as DDoS attacks. They also claimed to have posted a false story on News International's website claiming that Rupert Murdoch had died.
Lulzsec claimed to have attacked News International, owner of the Sun newspaper website, on which a false story was planted suggesting that the newspaper's owner Rupert Murdoch had died.
