A FORMER Colchester schoolboy has been jailed for hacking into top secret computer systems.
Ryan Cleary, 21, was part of the LulzSec collective who masterminded sophisticated cyber attacks on major institutions including the US Pentagon, FBI and CIA.
Cleary, who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, attended Heath School in Stanway for pupils with emotional and behavioural problems.
He was jailed for two years and eight months, after admitting six hacking charges at Southwark Crown Cour.
Judge Deborah Taylor, speaking to the gang, said: “You cared nothing for the privacy of others but did everything you could through your computer activities to hide your own identities while seeking publicity.”
Using the codename ViraL he, and his cyber pirate gang, used linked networks to get up to one million computers to overpower and crash websites.
Their targets lost millions of dollars and left millions of people at risk after personal data became readily available online.
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