Man Charged With Hacking the Federal Reserve Faces 12 Years

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A demonstrator stands along the fence during a protest in front of the White House on Nov. 5, 2013.

Image: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

By Fran Berkman2014-02-27 21:05:45 UTC

A British man stands accused of hacking into the computer servers for the U.S. Federal Reserve, stealing confidential information and posting it online.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City announced the charges and unsealed an indictment against the alleged hacker, Lauri Love, on Thursday. Love, who was 28 at the time of his arrest in the UK in October, faces charges of computer hacking and aggravated identity theft.

"Lauri Love is a sophisticated hacker who broke into Federal Reserve computers, stole sensitive personal information and made it widely available, leaving people vulnerable to malicious use of that information," U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.

Love allegedly executed the hack between October 2012 and February 2013, at which time the Federal Reserve admitted it had been hacked.

At the time, the hacktivst group Anonymous took credit for the attack as part of its "Operation Last Resort" campaign to avenge the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz. The government does not mention Anonymous in its indictment against Love, but it does state that Love worked with a team of hackers from around the globe.

The hackers allegedly communicated about the attack in a restricted chat room. The government seems to have somehow accessed that chat room, as the indictment against Love references a series of statements he supposedly made about the hack there.

Love reportedly used several aliases such as "nsh," "peace," "shift," "route" and "Smedly Butler." Prosecutors say Love exploited a vulnerability in the Fed's system with a technique known as a sequel injection (or SQL injection), which involves inserting malicious code that allows the hacker to obtain the contents of a database.

After accessing the database, Love allegedly posted the names, email addresses and phone numbers of those who used the Fed's system to a separate website, "which previously had been hacked and which he controlled," according to the indictment. Around the time of the incident, ZDnet reported that Anonymous dumped the personal information of some 4,000 bankers in the Fed's system onto a .gov website for Operation Last Resort.

The U.S. attorney's announcement of the indictment suggests Love is still in the UK. He faces a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison — 10 for computer hacking and two for aggravated identity theft. Love was previously indicted by federal prosecutors in New Jersey in October on separate charges of hacking government networks including several belonging to the U.S. military.

The New York federal prosecutor's indictment against Love is embedded below.

Lauri Love Indictment

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Topics: anonymous, crime, federal reserve, hacking, U.S., US & World, World