A judge in Dublin ruled against prison time Monday for Donncha O’Cearbhaill, a security researcher and former “LulzSec” hacker convicted of publishing a bogus obituary for Rupert Murdoch on one of the media mogul’s own websites in 2011.
O’Cearbhaill, 24, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court this week to two counts of criminal damage pertaining to the viral internet prank and was handed a suspended sentence nearly six years after the fact, the Irish Times first reported Tuesday.
As a member of a LulzSec, an internationally dispersed group of internet pranksters, O’Cearbhaill breached the website of a Murdoch-owned tabloid in July 2011 and posted an obituary falsely declaring the Australian publisher’s death in the midst of his own infamous hacking scandal.
“Murdoch, aged 80, has said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning,” the hackers posted to The Sun’s website on July 12, 2011. “Officers on the scene report a broken glass, a box of vintage wine, and what seems to be a family album strewn across the floor, containing images from days gone by; some containing hand-painted portraits of Murdoch in his early days, donning a top hat and monocle.”
The bogus obit was circulated widely within minutes despite being brazenly unsubtle and quickly made headlines on either side of the Atlantic. Then days later, LulzSec briefly redirected Sun visitors to its own Twitter feed in a separate hack.
The Sun stunt proved to be LulzSec’s last official prank; its members had publicly announced its disbandment days earlier, and O’Cearbhaill and other core participants were arrested before long pursuant to an international probe.
Unbeknownst to O’Cearbhaill and others, the FBI had infiltrated LulzSec in June 2011 and had been secretly monitoring the group on the inside through one of its core members, Hector “Sabu” Monsegur.
Armed with evidence gained from the FBI’s confidential informant, Irish authorities narrowed in on O’Cearbhaill in September 2011 and accused him of being a LulzSec hacker known as “palladium,” according to earlier court filings.
The Justice Department unsealed indictments in March 2012 charging O’Cearbhaill, another Irishman and two British men in connection with LulzSec’s hacking spree, and blamed its members of waging “a deliberate campaign of online destruction, intimidation and criminality.”
None of the four individuals have been extradited and tried in the U.S., though each has now been prosecuted locally following the conclusion this week of O’Cearbhaill’s legal proceedings.
O’Cearbhaill was only 18 years when he helped his LulzSec cohorts pull off the Murdoch prank, and an individual testifying on his behalf described him as a person of “rare intelligence,” the Times reported.
He apologized before the court this week for his “reckless” behavior and was handed a nine month sentence suspended dependent a number of undisclosed conditions, according to the newspaper.
“You thought it would be fun to inflict damage on the websites of this company,” Judge Martin Nolan said at Monday’s hearing, according to the Times.
Nonetheless, he acknowledged, “Mr. Murdoch is still happily living”
The Sun spent about three weeks rebuilding its website after the LulzSec attack, the Times reported. O’Cearbhaill was unavailable to comment.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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