Cody Kretsinger today pleaded guilty to the 2011 hack of Sony Pictures, acknowledging that he passed along information to other members of the LulzSec spinoff of Anonymous.
The FBI arrested Kretsinger, a 23-year-old Phoenix resident, in September 2011. He was charged with conspiracy and the unauthorized impairment of a protected computer.
According to Reuters, Kretsinger pleaded guilty to both charges, as part of a plea deal that will most likely see him evade the full 15-year maximum sentence he would normally face.
"I joined LulzSec, your honor, at which point we gained access to the Sony Pictures website," Kretsinger, who went by the hacking moniker "Recursion," told the judge after entering his guilty plea, the wire reported. LulzSec was considered to be a spinoff of Anonymous, the shadowy hacker and activist group that operates online, run by a few individuals with a legion of volunteers.
Earlier this month, the FBI arrested core members of hacking group LulzSec using intelligence gained by interrogating "Sabu", the group's nominal leader. Although a group claiming to be LulzSec hacked the email database of CSS Corp. earlier this month, experts doubt that the group has returned.
In June, hackers associated with LulzSec hacked into SonyPictures.com and compromised the personal information of more than 1 million users. While the group did not copy the information of all 1 million people due to financial restraints, it did access thousands of records, and Sony Pictures was later required to notify 37,500 users that their personal information might be at risk.
Kretsinger was apparently not involved in a hack against the Sony PlayStation Network, which cost the company $171 million and took the service offline for 77 million PlayStation Network members for a total of six weeks. The Sony Pictures hack cost Sony Pictures $600,000 in damages, Reuters reported.
The indictment accused Kretsinger and his cohorts of stealing information from Sony's website, posting it online, and taking credit for it via Twitter. The FBI said Kretsinger then erased the hard drive of the computer he used to hack the website.
Additional reporting by Chloe Albanesius.
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