Braggarts never prosper: A British man has been charged with hacking into U.S. government computers and stealing data about thousands of employees, then boasting about it on Twitter.
Lauri Love, 28, was arrested Friday at his home in Stradishall, England, according to the New Jersey District Attorney’s Office. He is charged with one count of accessing a U.S. department or agency computer without authorization and one count of conspiracy, PC World reports.
Over the past year, Love and three unnamed co-conspirators (two in Australia and one in Sweden) allegedly planted malware on government computers to steal data, according to the indictment.
The group compromised agencies including NASA, the U.S. Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. They are alleged to have obtained personal information of more than 4,000 employees.
The group allegedly publicized their attacks on Twitter.
Government databases were attacked using SQL injection techniques, which involves probing back-end databases.