By Michael Winter, USA TODAY
Two U.K. hackers pleaded guilty today to attacking websites of some big entertainment companies and government agencies in Britain and the United States.
LulzSec members Ryan Cleary, 20, and Jake Davis, 19, pleaded guilty in a London court to launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last year against several targets, including the CIA, the Arizona State Police, PBS, Sony, Nintendo, 20th Century Fox, News International and the U.K.'s Serious Organized Crime Agency and National Health Service, Agence France-Press says.
Cleary also pleaded guilty today to four other hacking crimes, including DDoS attacks on U.S. Air Force computers at the Pentagon. A DDos attack overwhelms websites with simultaneous requests and ultimately crashes them.
But both denied two charges that they had posted "unlawfully obtained confidential computer data" to sites such as the Pirate Bay and Pastebin. Davis faces trial on those charges in October, AFP says, while Cleary will be tried next April with two other British defendants, Ryan Ackroyd, 25, and a 17-year-old student, who denied being involved in the DDoS attacks.
Two weeks ago in Los Angeles, Cleary was indicted for the attacks on Fox, Sony and PBS, but as he is unlikely to be extradited to the United States, officials said.
LulzSec -- Lulz Security -- is an off-shoot of the loose confederation of hackers known as Anonymous.