Assignment #2: Analysis of an online crime

Case:
Second member of a hacking group sentenced to over a year in prison for stealing customer information from Sony Pictures Computers.

Summary:
The case is about a man named Raynaldo Riviera, who’s known by the online moniker ”neuron”. He’s a member of the LulzSec hacking group, and was sentenced to one year in federal prison for participating in an extensive computer attack that compromised the computer systems of Sony Pictures Entertainment. The result was that information about 138,00 people was being posted on the Internet.

John Suler describes how people act differently online then they would in the real world. He calls it the online disinhibition effect. Six factors that interact with each other in creating this effect are dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority.

According to a court document, Riviera’s goal in the attacks on Sony Pictures and other corporate and government entities was to see the “raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy, and to provide stolen personal information so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it”. It’s very clear that this is what Suler describes as “toxic disinhibition”, because Riviera is out to hurt people by steal their identities. When it comes to the six factors described above, we can say that the crime probably was motivated by dissociative anonymity and invisibility. Riviera and his hacking group LulzSec has previously been connected to the loose collective of computer hackers “Anonymous”, who’s known for cyber attacks and disseminating of confidential information stolen from victims’ computers. Both for Anonymous and LulzSec invisibility and anonymity are important factors for how they act. It’s also a probability that Riviera did what he did for his own thrill and entertainment, and maybe even out of boredom. 

http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2013/102.html" http://www.justice.gov/usao/cac/Pressroom/2013/102.html

Written by:
Anine Jorstad Paulsen