Has LulzSec member Kayla been arrested?

Two men were arrested yesterday by the Metropolitan Police Service’s Central e-Crime Unit in connection with cyber attacks executed by hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec.

Aged 20 and 26, the two men were picked up at separated addresses in Mexborough, Doncaster, South Yorkshire and Warminster, Wiltshire, and have been detained. The house at the Doncaster address has additionally been searched for evidence and the police has sized the found computer equipment in order to perform forensic examination on it.

According to the statement issued by the police, these arrests may have been an attempt to hunt down the LulzSec member that goes under the handle Kayla.

According to previous statements by the group, Kayla is a 16-year-old girl, but that is thought to be just an attempt to sidetrack investigators. In the meantime, “her” Twitter account has gone silent for nearly 24 hours.

The two men are facing charges of having conspired to commit offenses under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, and will be detained for the time being.

“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 United States.” commented DI Mark Raymond from the PCeU.

Also yesterday, two previously arrested British men thought to be Anonymous members – Christopher Jan Weatherhead, 20, of Holly Road, Northampton and Ashley Rhodes, 26, of Bolton Crescent SE5 – have been charged with “Conspiracy to do an unauthorized act in relation to a computer, with intent to impair the operation of any computer or prevent or hinder access to any programme or data held in a computer or to impair the operation of any such programme or the reliability of such data.”

They will be appearing before the City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court on 7 September.