U.K. Teen Arrested For Alleged LulzSec Connection

British police arrested a teenager in Essex allegedly connected to the hacker group LulzSec, responsible for a slew of recent high profile Web site hacks and denial of service attacks.

Britain’s Metropolitan Police Service, also known as Scotland Yard, confirmed the teen’s arrest on its Web site. The arrest was a collaborative effort between British authorities and the FBI.

’Officers from the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have arrested a 19-year-old man in a pre-planned intelligence-led operation,’ according to a statement released by Britain’s Metropolitan Police Service. ’The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group.’

The man, arrested on suspicion of violating the country’s Computer Misuse Act, and Fraud Act, was taken to a central London police station Tuesday for questioning, according to British police.

Police searched the suspect’s home in Wickford, Essex for evidence following the arrest. The forensic investigation is ongoing, police said.

Meanwhile, LulzSec members denied that the teen was a mastermind behind the hacker group's endeavors.

’Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it's all over now... wait... we're all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?’ LulzSec said over Twitter .

LulzSec emerged from relative obscurity to the center of the public eye in recent months with a slew of high-profile Web hacks, including attacks against Sony, the U.S. Senate, an affiliate of the FBI and the CIA’s public facing Web site.

Subsequently, law enforcement officials have been faced with mounting pressure to bring the attackers to justice as the group continued to get away with its rampage of embarrassing and destructive attacks against governments and corporations.

Most recently, the group announced that they had successfully obtained census records for every U.K. citizen, which they planned to release over Pirate Bay once they were reformatted.

’We have blissfully obtained records of every single citizen who gave their records to the security-illiterate UK government for the 2011 census,’ LulzSecsaid on a pastebin post . ’We're keeping them under lock and key though... so don't worry about your privacy (...until we finish re-formatting them for release). Myself and the rest of my Lulz shipmates will then embark upon a trip to ThePirateBay with our beautiful records for your viewing pleasure!’

The threat came days after LulzSec and the loose-knit hacker collective Anonymous announced that they were teaming up to target world governments with more of their public cyber attacks.

However, LulzSec isn’t taking responsibility for all attacks. The group publicly denied that it was behind the recent Sega Pass attack and pledged to avenge the company.

’@Sega - contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down,’ LulzSec said in its Twitter post.

Next: LulzSec Hacks May Lead To Group's Demise Experts Say

Security experts wonder if the seemingly endless string of attacks against law enforcement agencies and corporations will eventually lead to the LulzSec’s demise.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in a blog post that LulzSec had become ’drunk with popularity’ of their Twitter account, which has more than 220,000 followers. Meanwhile, the group has become increasingly more brazen with their tweets, which they use to announce new hacks into some of the world’s most powerful organizations.

’The controversial LulzSec group have been playing a dangerous game as they targeted ’big players’ such as the crime-fighting agencies around the world. Inevitably the authorities were not going to take kindly to that, and would put man-power to work seeking out intelligence as to who could be involved,’ said Cluley in a blog post . ’One had to wonder if all of this bragging could lead to the group’s downfall. It would, after all, be hard to keep a secret from friends and peers if you were a member of LulzSec.’