British Citizen Charged with Spying in UK and US

[Atreides]

A British man was arrested in the United Kingdom and charged by both the US and Britain with hacking into American government computer systems. The systems that Lauri Love and three his fellows hacked into were the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, NASA, the US Army Corps of Engineers, and even the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Lauri Love, 28, and his unnamed co-conspirators in Australia and Sweden were leaving “back doors†in the networks in order to later retrieve information. Lauri was charged in the UK with violating the Computer Misuse Act, and in the US – with accessing an American government computer system without permission and conspiracy.

The hacking took place during the last year, compromising personal information of the US military and data on defense budgets, contract bidding, and the demolition and disposal of military facilities. The authorities claim that the hacking caused millions of dollars of losses.

Love was arrested at his home by the cybercrime unit of the UK’s National Crime Agency and other officials, but was later bailed until February. It became known that he used online chat rooms for discussing his hacking and efforts to conceal it. In one of them, Lauri discussed the hacking of an Army Corps database which might have contained 400,000 email addresses – the authorities allege that he asked his co-conspirator to grab one email for curiosity. Other allegations read that in July 2013, Love bragged about accessing a NASA database, claiming: “We owning lots of NASA sitesâ€.

The alleged hacked systems were discovered in Mississippi and the US Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. They also included a server hosting data about military personnel at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.

The attorneys admit that Lauri Love faces up to 5 years of jail time and a fine on each criminal count in the United States, if he is found guilty of the alleged offences. Besides, prosecutors claimed that Love faces additional charges in federal court in Virginia, stemming from other unspecified “intrusionsâ€.