Hacker bailed ahead of sentencing
A computer hacker who took part in high-tech cyber attacks on the CIA and a British police force from his bedroom in Shetland has been bailed ahead of sentencing.
Jake Davis, 20, was part of loosely-organised hacker collective Lulzsec which hijacked computers to overwhelm the systems of major bodies.
High-profile victims of the attack, which ground servers to a halt by overloading them with useless information, included Sony, newspaper publisher News International and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. The so-called “distributed denial of service” attacks (Ddos) work by flooding computers with traffic.
Davis, who used the online pseudonym “Topiary”, spent much of his youth in Yell but moved to Hoofields in Lerwick in 2011 where he was arrested in August of that year. He has since moved to Spalding in Lincolnshire.
Davis had been due to stand trial but today the prosecution at Southwark Crown Court accepted his guilty pleas made at an earlier hearing. It is expected he will be sentenced next month.
Co-accused Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, of Peckham, London, admitted the same charges, while Ryan Cleary, 21, had previously admitted joining the hack attacks. He is awaiting sentencing.
A fourth man, Ryan Ackroyd, 26, of Mexborough, Doncaster, denies the same two counts and faces trial.
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