British Man Charged With Hacking U.S. Military Systems

Hacker called scheme "hilarious"

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Federal prosecutors are charging a British man with hacking into U.S. military computer systems and stealing personal information from military personnel, authorities said Monday.

Lauri Love was arrested in the United Kingdom on Friday. The U.S. Attorney in New Jersey announced Monday that Love was indicted for allegedly hacking into the computer systems of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, the EPA and NASA between October 2012 and October 2013, and for stealing the personal identifying information of thousands of people, including many servicemen.

Love remains in the United Kingdom and it wasn’t immediately clear if or when he’ll be extradited to the U.S. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said there isn’t yet a lawyer representing him.

Love, 28, and his co-conspirators allegedly hacked into the databases and left “back doors” within the networks, which allowed them to return to steal more information from the compromised networks.

The indictment document includes online chats between Love and some of his co-conspirators, which reveal their intention to hack the sites and cover their tracks. At one point, Love wrote, “we owning lots of nasa sites, including nasajobs,” and then wrote “like 10 subdomains of nasa.gov :)”.

“I think we can do some hilarious stuff with it,” he wrote.