Adrian Lamo, the former hacker best known for breaching the systems of The New York Times and turning in Chelsea Manning to authorities, has died at age 37.
His passing was announced on Friday by his father, Mario Lamo, on the Facebook page of the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine.
“With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son…” he wrote.
Lamo had been living in Wichita, Kansas, and he was found dead in an apartment on Wednesday. The cause of death is not known, but representatives of local police said they had found nothing suspicious, The Wichita Eagle reported.
Lamo broke into the systems of companies such as Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, Microsoft and The New York Times in an effort to demonstrate that they had been vulnerable to hacker attacks.
He was arrested in 2003 and in early 2004 he pleaded guilty to computer crimes against Microsoft, The New York Times, and data analytics provider LexisNexis. He was sentenced to six months’ detention at the home of his parents.
Lamo drew criticism in 2010 after he reported Chelsea Manning (at the time U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning) to the Army for leaking a massive amount of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
Related: Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 years
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