Cody Kretsinger, arrested last week for participating in the LulzSec face-smashing of Sony Pictures, was a good kid. Aside from his massively illegal hacking, he was a bright student who just wanted a family and to work for the government.
Online security journalist Brian Krebs tracked down Kretsinger’s straight arrow past, discovering that he was named Student of the Month at Arizona’s University of Advancing Technology, where he was studying network security, and scheduled to graduate later this year. Not anymore.
Kretsinger, interviewed for his profile as an accomplished student, lays out his hopes for the future — hopes that probably didn’t include a federal indictment. The page has since vanished (UAT must have a good PR team!), but Krebs points to the Google cache here.
Kretsinger says he was working on getting the school’s first FM radio station up and running, dreamt of working for the Department of defence or NSA someday, having a “great family”, and “maybe a ’64 GTO or something”. He also notes that “some of the larger projects [I’m working on]I can’t talk about”. Hmm.
So in other words, he was like most other guys his age, on the outside. But beneath it all, he was helping execute one of the most prominent, buzz-churning hacks of all time. [Krebs on Security via BGR]