A hacker has been sentenced to a year in prison for helping to break into the servers of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Cody Kretsinger, a member of the hacker collective LulzSec, pleaded guilty in April of 2012 to one count of conspiracy and one count of unauthorized impairment of a protect computer.
Reuters reports that online, the 25 year old Kretsinger went by the handle of Recursion. He, along with other members of LulzSec, broke into the Sony servers and stole the credentials and personal information of over 70 million user accounts on the PlayStation Network and Sony Online services. This led to a highly publicized shutdown of Sony's network for the better part of a month.
The company was further fined £250,000 by the information Commissioner's Office in the UK for what it called a "serious breach of the Data Protection Act." The ICO alleged that Sony had not adequately protected its customers' data.
Sony prosecutors in the case have stated that in total, the LulzSec network breach cost the company over $600,000 in damages and fines.
Kretsinger has been ordered by a Los Angeles district judge to serve 12 months in prison in addition to a subsequent 1,000 hours of community service upon his release. This past week, three other members of LulzSec also pleaded guilty to computer hacking related charges. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, and Mustafa al-Bassam were charged at the Southwark Crown Court in London, where they admitted to taking part in hacks on Nintendo, Sony, and plotting to take down law enforcement websites in the U.S. and U.K.
The LulzSec organization is an offshoot of the hacktivist arm of the group Anonymous. They first gained prominence in 2011 after hacking The Sun's website to release a false report that Rupert Murdoch was dead, and for their part in defending the website WikiLeaks.
Later that year, the founder of LulzSec, Hector Xavier Monsegur, aka Sabu, was arrested in conjunction with the group's activities. He later assisted the FBI in the arrest of five other hackers from the groups Anonymous, Lulzsec, and Antisec
They later took responsibility for the aforementioned Sony network hack, an investigation that will continue even after this latest sentencing.