Suspected Anonymous hacker 'had 750,000 passwords', court hears

Filed Under: Malware, Law & order, Data loss, Denial of Service

Jake DavisA London court heard this morning how 18-year-old Jake Davis allegedly had the login passwords of 750,000 people on his computer when he was arrested in the Shetland Islands last week.

Davis is suspected by the authorities of being "Topiary", the public face of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivist groups.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, Westminster Magistrates' Court heard that Davis was charged with five offences including unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a denial-of-service attack against the Serious Organised Crime Agency's (SOCA) website, which overloaded the site with traffic.

Furthermore, prosecutors are reported to have claimed that Davis's laptop was found to contain the fake article announcing Rupert Murdoch's death that visitors to The Sun's hacked website saw for a period of time earlier this month.

Fake news story claiming that Rupert Murdoch is dead

Jake Davis has been given bail until August 30th, on the condition that he wears an electronic tag and does not access the internet.

The teenager who wore dark sunglasses and a blue denim shirt, and only spoke in court to confirm his name and address, was surrounded by a scrum of media photographers after the hearing.

Image credit: Image of Jake Davis outside the court by Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times.

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One Response to Suspected Anonymous hacker 'had 750,000 passwords', court hears

  1. Brian says:

    Encrypted hard drive doesn't matter. If a warrant is served, one must hand over the encryption keys otherwise one is obstructing justice.

    Can't recall the exact details, but there was a case in England some time ago where a guy did time because he refused to hand over the keys to a encrypted disk. At the end of the stretch, he still had to hand them over.

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Graham Cluley has worked in the computer security industry for more than 20 years, developing anti-virus software and doing quite a lot of talking about internet threats. He's won awards for his blogging, but is proudest of the text adventure games he wrote when he was still wearing short trousers. You can learn more about those (the games, not the trousers) at grahamcluley.com. Send Graham an email, subscribe to his updates on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and App.net, and circle him on Google Plus for regular updates.