Former LulzSec member gets prison sentence for Sony Pictures hack

A 25-year-old hacker with the group known as LulzSec was sentenced Thursday to a year in prison and ordered to pay $605,663 in restitution for an attack on Sony Pictures computers that began in late May 2011.

Cody Andrew Kretsinger, who went by the online nickname "recursion," was also sentenced to a year of home detention and 1,000 hours of community service.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles said Kretsinger pleaded guilty last April to the attack, in which hackers breached the Sony Pictures website, stole personal data including the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of tens of thousands of Sony customers and distributed it over the Internet.

Raynaldo Rivera, a 20-year-old who also pleaded guilty to the attack in October, is to be sentenced May 16.

LulzSec, whose name draws on Internet-speak for "laugh out loud," shot to prominence in mid-2011 with an eye-catching attack on U.S. television network PBS, whose website it defaced with a bogus story claiming that the late rapper Tupac Shakur had been discovered alive in New Zealand.

An offshoot of the loose-knit movement known as Anonymous, LulzSec and its reputed leader, known as Sabu, had some of the highest profiles in the movement. But last year U.S. officials unmasked Sabu as FBI informant Hector Xavier Monsegur and officials on both sides of the Atlantic swooped in on his alleged collaborators, making roughly half a dozen arrests.