MOSCOW, October 14 (RIA Novosti) - One of the cyberattackers who hacked the UK's Sun newspaper in 2011 had links with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Motherboard reported Tuesday.
In July 2011, a group of hackers called "Lulzsec" conducted a cyberattack on the UK's Sun newspaper placing a fake story that the owner of the newspaper, Rupert Murdoch, had died. They also claimed to have obtained a lot of material from the servers of News UK co-owned by business magnate Murdoch.
Motherboard stated that the cyberattack was carried out within a campaign against Rupert Murdoch's British media empire amid the hacking scandal around "The News of the World".
According to the magazine, recent publications by the FBI show that among the cyberhackers was a certain Hector Xavier Monsegur, also known online as "Sabu", who was taken into custody by the FBI for a number of cyberhacking offenses in June 2011, about a month prior to the attack. In an attempt to secure a lenient sentence, Monsegur, the magazine notes, started cooperating with the FBI.
Monsegur was initially sentenced to 124 years of imprisonment; however, for his extraordinary cooperation, the court lifted all the charges on him.
According to Motherboard, as part of his cooperation with the FBI, Monsegur also carried out cyberattacks against FBI contractors, computer servers in many foreign countries as well as Brazilian government websites.
WikiLeaks attorney Michael Ratner told Motherboard that the US government should be brought before the courts for what has happened.
"What's most interesting to me is how the FBI, DOJ, and perhaps others used Monsegur, or 'Sabu,' to catch other hackers. Who should be on trial here isn't Hammond, and isn't Sabu, but the federal government which used this group of hackers to penetrate other websites as well as foreign countries," Ratner said.
The FBI and representatives for Murdoch have declined to comment on the matter, Motherboard reported.
