Sony Hacker Busted

A teenager in London has been arrested in connection with the hacking of Sony, London’s Metropolitan Police said Tuesday.

The 19-year-old is suspected of hacking into systems and mounting denial of service attacks against “a number of international businesses and intelligence agencies,” police said. Naming suspects who have been arrested in Britain is illegal.

Sony’s PlayStation Network went down on April 20 after what Sony said was a massive data breach. It had more than 70 million subscribers at the time.

It began coming back on line in mid-May. The PlayStation Store did not reopen until June 2.

The company estimated the cost of that attack will total $171 million.

Hackers later broke into Sony Pictures website, compromising the accounts of over 1 million users, and the gaming company SEGA, stealing nearly 1.3 million users’ details via a British subsidiary of the Japanese company. SEGA makes games for PlayStation and other gaming systems.

The suspect’s computer “will now be examined for ties to any potential group, including LulzSec,” a police spokesman told CNN, declining to be named in line with custom.

“This link has not been established yet as it is still early days,” the spokesman said.

The hacker group LulzSec claimed recently to have attacked the CIA website, and took credit for hacking into the website of the American public broadcaster PBS and posting a fake story saying the rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive. He was killed nearly 15 years ago.

It’s unclear whether LulzSec members played a role in the Sony PlayStation Network breach.

But they have posted on their website what they claim is proprietary information from Sony Pictures and other Sony properties’ websites.

On Friday, on the occasion of their 1,000th tweet, the group posted a manifesto of sorts in which they said people, including their targets and advocates of Internet freedom, should be thankful.

“The main anti-LulzSec argument suggests that … our actions are causing clowns with pens to write new rules for you,” the group wrote. “But what if we just hadn’t released anything? What if we were silent? That would mean we would be secretly inside FBI affiliates right now, inside PBS, inside Sony… watching… abusing… .”

They seemed to suggest that by making their attacks public, they’ll push websites to increase security. They said they’re sitting on account information for 200,000 players of the online game Brink, but moments later said that releasing people’s information is worth doing sometimes because it’s fun.

“Yes, yes, there’s always the argument that releasing everything in full is just as evil, what with accounts being stolen and abused, but welcome to 2011,” they wrote. “This is the lulz lizard era, where we do things just because we find it entertaining.”

Analysts said the group appears to be some sort of spin-off of “Anonymous,” the loose coalition of hackers that grew to prominence through their support of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks.

But while Anonymous has its own set of moral codes and is largely politically motivated, LulzSec seems to be random.

For every hack like the one on PBS, which the group said came out of anger over a documentary about WikiLeaks, there’s the cracking of porn site pron.com — and a subsequent public list of members’ e-mail addresses and passwords.

LulzSec has not yet posted a comment on the arrest of the teen in Essex, outside London, which police said was “intelligence-led.”

The suspect was arrested Monday night and police are now examining a “significant amount of material,” they said.