Ryan Cleary Arrested

Ryan Cleary,  photo borrowed from Sky News
Arrested: Ryan Cleary, pictured here aged 13, is suspected of launching cyber attacks from his Essex bungalow
Ryan Cleary, pictured here at age 13, photo from the Daily Mail


update: Ryan Cleary has been charged with five offences under the Computer Misuse Act, police said. It was also revealed the FBI seized servers in Virginia, run by Swiss web hosting company DigitalOne, around the time Cleary was arrested. Sven Slootweg, AKA Joepie91 owner of Anonnews.org, was named by the Daily Mail as a Lulzsec member. Slootweg is also active on encyclopediadramatica.ch and recently removed Cleary's systems administrator privileges because of his jailing.
It was first reportied Tuesday morning Jun 21 2011 that encyclopediadramatica.ch owner Ryan Cleary was arrested.

Ryan Cleary, an alleged member of the hacking group behind the claim, LulzSec, was arrested in Essex this morning by specialist cyber crime officers from Scotland Yard.

The 19-year-old was taken to a central London police station and remains in custody on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act and Fraud Act offences.

A “significant amount of material” was also seized from an address in Wickford, Essex.

Scotland Yard has also confirmed that a 19 year old resident of Wickford, Essex is in custody.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have arrested a 19-year-old man in a pre-planned intelligence-led operation.

The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group.


The teenager was arrested on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act, and Fraud Act offences and was taken to a central London police station, where he currently remains in custody for questioning.

Searches at a residential address in Wickford, Essex, following the arrest last night have led to the examination of a significant amount of material. These forensic examinations remain ongoing.

The PCeU was assisted by officers from Essex Police and have been working in co-operation with the FBI.

More from the BBC.

The teenager's mother spoke to BBC Radio Essex and confirmed her son had been arrested at 0330BST on Tuesday.

She said he had been obsessed with computers since he was 12 and added: "Computers were his world."



More from The Daily Mail:

Ryan, a loner whose family says 'lives his life online', faces the prospect of extradition to the U.S where he could face 60 years' behind bars for allegedly hacking into the CIA and Senate websites.

Ryan's mother Rita, 44, said her son suffers from agoraphobia and attention deficit disorder and had not left his bedroom for four years.

Speaking at the family's home in Wickford, she said Ryan was an introverted boy who 'lives his life online'.

She added: 'He has a history of mental problems.

'He left school at 15.

'He has stayed in his room for the last four years in front of his computer.

'He is bright, but does not have any social skills.'

The teenager attended Heath School, in Stanway, Colchester, a school for children with special needs, and is said to have constantly spoken in 'computer jargon'.

Police arrived at the house on Monday night and are said to have spent five hours talking to Ryan. 

More from The Sun: 

Police sources said a "mind-boggling amount of information" had been seized from one of the nerdy lad's two computers.

They added the swoop was just the start of what could be a "long and complex" inquiry - and further arrests were possible.

Stunned Rita, a nurse at Southend Hospital, said her son "lives his life online".

She told how he has a history of mental illness and suffers from agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces, but is highly intelligent. Rita added that she thought he was playing computer games in his bedroom and cannot believe he was hacking into security agency websites.  
All the websites on the netblocks owned by Saad Naveed were unavailable for a short while Tue Jun 21 2011.