British police announced that they arrested a 19-year-old in Essex, outside London, in possible connection with the hacking of Sony, the CIA, and the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency. The joint operation between the Scotland Yard and the FBI “follows an investigation into network intrusions and distributed denial of service attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group. Searches at a residential address in Wickford, Essex, following the arrest last night have led to the examination of a significant amount of material,? said a Scotland Yard spokesman. In Britain, it is illegal to name suspects who have been arrested but the spokesman said that the arrested man’s computers will also be examined for activities linked between the suspect and LulzSec.

London’s Metropolitan Police said the man is being interrogated in a London police station, and it is suspected that he is in violation of the British Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act. A related article on Wired.com says, “The Guardian identified the suspect as Ryan Cleary of Wickford, Essex. In May, the griefer group Anonymous ? now a LulzSec ally ? outed Cleary as a Anonymous member called ‘viraL’ who’d attempted an internal coup in an Anonymous chat room. Phone calls to Cleary’s last known number went directly to voice mail Tuesday.” The alleged suspect, Ryan Cleary is said to have been “responsible for running one of the IRC servers used by AnonOps, a faction of the Anonymous group that co-ordinated attacks on both perceived ‘enemies’ of WikiLeaks and various Middle Eastern governments, until an acrimonious split last month. Subsequently, he is believed to have been a member of Lulz Security, responsible for running that group’s IRC server.” LulzSec has denied that the arrested suspect is their proposed ringleader by posting the message in the image above on their Twitter site, which has over 230,000 followers.

This is just the beginning, as LulzSec has teamed up with another major hacking Group, Anonymous, who together have declared a cyber war against government and security agencies around the world.

Photo by Stan Schroeder via Mashable