Alleged LulzSec hacker 'Kayla' arrested by UK police

Another two men suspected of involvement in attacks by Anonymous and LulzSec have been arrested by British police, bringing the total detained in an extraordinary week to seven.

The unnamed pair, a 24-year old picked up in Doncaster, and a 20-year old detained in Wiltshire, are reportedly being connected by police sources to the activities of one member of the LulzSec collective who used the handle ‘Kayla’.

Earlier this week, four other men between the age of 17 and 26 were charged for offences under the Computer Misuse Act (1990), and a 16-year old was referred to Youth Justice Board. Only three of those individuals were named.

"The arrests relate to our inquiries into a series of serious computer intrusions and online denial-of-service attacks recently suffered by a number of multi-national companies, public institutions and government and law enforcement agencies in Great Britain and the US,” Detective Inspector Mark Raymond from the Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU), was reported as saying.

The significance of ‘Kayla’ within the Lulzsec group is unclear. The assumption for some time is that this individual was connected to the attack on security firm HB Gary in February, but that is based on a web of claims, accusations and rumour. The Twitter feed for Kayla offered few clues and was considered uninteresting as a source of hacking chatter.

What is clear is that the short era of 'DDoS-and-tell' could be drawing to a close as the risks of taking responsibility for events in a way that creates a chain of evidence becomes apparent; hacktivism could be about to go back underground again.