Lulzsec takes down Brazilian government web sites and asks police to arrest two men

NINJA PIRATE HACKER GROUP Lulzsec has taken down two web sites of the Brazilian government and has leaked the private details of two individuals who got on its bad side.

The Brazilian division of Lulzsec took down two major government web sites, brasil.gov.br and presidencia.gov.br, presumably using Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks to overload the web sites with illegitimate traffic. These web sites remain offline.

The main group also leaked information relating to a Marshal Webb from Hamilton, Ohio and his associate Michael Dean Major from Halethorpe, Maryland in the US. Lulzsec posted their details, which include screen names, IP addresses, phone numbers and home addresses, after they leaked the logs of some Lulzsec affiliates.

Lulzsec revealed that Webb allegedly hacked the game Deus Ex and that he and Major were both involved in other cybercrimes. It called on law enforcement agencies to hunt them down.

The move follows the arrest of an alleged member of Lulzsec yesterday. It has been confirmed that this individual was 19-year-old Ryan Cleary. According to his mother, a dozen police officers raided their home, arresting her son and seizing his computers.

Scotland Yard revealed that it examined a "significant amount of material" from what was seized. This information could be used to arrest further individuals connected with the recent spate of hacking attacks, which have included online assaults on Sony, the International Monetary Fund, the FBI, the CIA and the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).

The London Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson described the arrest of Cleary as "very significant" and characterised the recent wave of cyber attacks as "deeply worrying".

Lulzsec claims that Cleary is not part of its group and that he is only "mildly associated" with the group via use of chatrooms on his IRC server. If this is true, then it's likely that he will not have much information on the reportedly six remaining members of the group who supposedly are still at large.

Cleary was previously linked with the hacktivist group Anonymous, which targeted organisations that withdrew support for the whistleblower web site Wikileaks. He apparently fell into the bad books of Anonymous after hacking its web sites and stealing passwords.

His information was published online in a revenge attack, in exactly the same way that Lulzsec has published the details of Webb and Major, which suggests we might see further arrests of alleged hackers as their former friends and colleagues turn on them, and turn them in. µ