British police said Wednesday they arrested a suspected member of the cyberhacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous. The e-crime unit of the U.K.'s Metropolitan Police Service believes the young man now in Scotland Yard custody most recently served as the group spokesperson for LulzSec, using the online nickname Topiary.
The suspect was reportedly arrested at a residential address in the Shetland Islands. A search of his residence was under way as the 19-year-old was transported to a police station in central London. Additionally, U.K. police were interviewing a 17-year-old male in connection with the same inquiry, although the youth had not been formally arrested.
In his Twitter account, Topiary described himself as a "simple prankster" who has "worked with Anonymous, LulzSec and other such paragons of intense cyber victory." His sole surviving tweet, which dates from last week, is "You can't arrest an idea."
A Coordinated Hacker Crackdown
On July 19, 14 suspected members of Anonymous were arrested in the United States during a nationwide sweep conducted by the FBI in coordination with local law enforcement. Five arrests were also made in Europe as part of ongoing investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service and the Dutch National Police Agency.
The suspects arrested in the U.S. were charged with participating in a distributed denial-of-service cyberattack on PayPal. That attack orchestrated by Anonymous was the group's response to PayPal's refusal to continue processing payments for WikiLeaks, which released classified U.S. State Department cables last year.
The defendants arraigned in the U.S. are charged with various counts of conspiracy, each of which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. They also face various counts of causing intentional damage to a protected computer, with each count carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Facing Stiff Penalties
In response to the arrests in Europe and the U.S., LulzSec and Anonymous issued a joint statement early Wednesday. The groups contended that it's an injustice for the same criminal penalties imposed on cybercriminals controlling a botnet to be applied to individuals who added their voice to what they claim amounted to no more than a digital sit-in.
"We will not sit down and let ourselves be trampled upon by any corporation or government," LulzSec and Anonymous said in the statement posted at Pastebin. "We are not scared of you, and that is something for you to be scared of. We are not the terrorists here: you are."
In their latest tweets and the joint statement, LulzSec and Anonymous continued to encourage others to stop using eBay subsidiary PayPal, which has 100.3 million users around the world and generated more than $1 billion in revenue during the second quarter.
"The first step to being truly free is not putting one's trust into a company that freezes accounts when it feels like, or when it is pressured by the U.S. government," LulzSec and Anonymous contended.
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