Raynaldo Rivera, a 20 year-old from Tempe, Arizona, surrendered to authorities in Phoenix on Tuesday. Rivera stands accused of being a member of LulzSec and taking part in their attack on Sony last year. If true, he would be the second member of the group arrested in connection to the attack.
Six days before his arrest, Rivera was the subject of an indictment by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles, which charges him with conspiracy and unauthorized impairment of a protect computer.
According to the charges, Rivera and his co-conspirators compromised sensitive information during the attack on Sony in May and June of 2011, via SQL Injection. Moreover, the indictment says that Rivera posted the compromised data on the LulzSec website, and announced it via Twitter on the @LulzSec account.
If convicted, Rivera faces 15 years in prison. Prior to this latest development, Cody Kretsinger, 24, pled guilty to his role in the attack on Sony and admitted to being a member of LulzSec.
Earlier this year LulzSec suffered a major setback when the FBI admitted that the public figurehead of the group, Sabu (Hector Xavier Monsegur), was flipped as an informant and helped the agency build cases against those who were arrested in March.
Last week, the Department of Justice asked for a sentencing delay on Sabu’s behalf, “in the light of the defendant’s ongoing cooperation with the Government.”
Sabu faces an estimated 124 years for his role as the leader of LulzSec.
In August of 2011, he pleaded guilty to 12 different offences including three counts of computer hacking conspiracy, five counts of computer hacking, one count of computer hacking in furtherance of fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, and one count of aggravated identity theft.
