Teenage hacker Cosmo sentenced, enters plea bargain

Hacker "Cosmo", the head of the hactivist group UGNazi, has been sentenced by a youth court in Long Beach, California. According to a report in Wired, the 15-year-old male pleaded guilty to a number of felonies in exchange for a probation.

In view of the defendant's age, the court and public defender have declined to comment on the hearings. However, Cosmo stated that he will remain on probation until he is 21 years old. During his probation, he will only be allowed to use the internet with the consent of his parole officer, is not to use the internet without being supervised, and must hand over all logins and passwords. He is also forbidden from contacting members of Anonymous or his hacker friends from UGNazi. Should he breach these conditions, he could face three years in prision.

The FBI arrested Cosmo in late May, shortly after the UGNazi hacker had hacked servers belonging to major UK payment services provider WHMCS, from which he copied important information, which he posted online. The stolen data included a MySQL dump of the company's customer database containing nearly 130,000 records, and data from the main server. The hackers also gained access to WHMCS' Twitter account and infiltrated the user forum. The group is also believed to have been responsible for numerous distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks carried out from its own botnet, including an attack on the US Department of Education web site.

(crve)