British police charge 19-year-old in hacking probe

British police on Wednesday charged 19-year-old Ryan Cleary with cybercrime offences, Scotland Yard said, following his arrest in connection with an international hacking group. Cleary faces five charges including for hacking the website of Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), and will appear in court in central London on Thursday, it said in a statement. The young man "has this afternoon been charged with offences under the Criminal Law Act and Computer Misuse Act by officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's Police Central e-Crime Unit," it said. Police have previously said Cleary was arrested on Monday at his home in Wickford, southeast England, for alleged links to the Lulz Security group, which has claimed attacks on SOCA and on the CIA in the United States. The statement said Cleary was charged with targeting the SOCA website on Monday with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. DDoS attacks overwhelm websites with requests, causing them to be slow or inaccessible. He was also charged with hacking the website of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in November and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) on October, it said. Cleary faces two charges of creating a "botnet" or network of computers to carry out DDoS attacks.