UK police said they arrested the alleged second of four co-founders of the hacking supergroup Lulz Security, one of those still at large branched out into a legal form of protest, promoting a boycott of PayPal.
Scotland Yard said it arrested the suspected Lulz Security spokesman, a 19-year-old known online as Topiary, at a residence in the Shetland Islands on Tuesday. That came a week after a 16-year-old believed to be Tflow was picked up in South London.
The tender ages of the suspects surprised some private security experts who have been involved in the international hunt for the group, which had gone on an unprecedented public hacking spree that touched everyone from the CIA to Sony to News Corp. to Sony again and Sony some more.
Lulz officially disbanded a month ago and called on its followers to rejoin Anonymous, the broader collective made famous for its brute force denial-of-service attacks on the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal after those firms stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks last year.
Last week, the US made its first 16 arrests in the Anonymous and Lulz probe, and 14 of the suspects were picked up for the attacks on PayPal, which is owned by Ebay.
Court filings emerged this week showing that PayPal went to some trouble to help the FBI build those cases, and the former Lulz leader known as Sabu urged people on Tuesday to show their disapproval by closing their PayPal accounts.
Anonymous members claimed tens of thousands of such cancellations, but a PayPal spokesman said the volume was within normal bounds.
Sabu didn’t pledge to give up on more dramatic gestures, such as electronic breaking and entering. But with more reason to fear that spree may come to an end in the near term, he may be trying to package a legacy with more claims to legitimacy.
As Topiary put it in his final Tweet: “You cannot arrest an idea.”
