Cosmo the God in a park near his Long Beach home. Photo: Sandra Garcia/Wired
The 15 year-old UG Nazi hacker known as Cosmo* or Cosmo the God was sentenced in juvenile court on Wednesday in Long Beach, California. According to Cosmo, he pleaded guilty to multiple felonies in exchange for probation, encompassing all the charges brought against him, which included charges based on credit card fraud, identity theft, bomb threats, and online impersonation.
Over the course of 2012, Cosmo and his group UG Nazi took part in many of the highest-profile hacking incidents of the year. UG Nazi, which began as a politicized group that opposed SOPA, took down a bevy of websites this year, including those for NASDAQ, CIA.gov, and UFC.com. It redirected 4Chan’s DNS to point to its own Twitter feed. Cosmo pioneered social engineering techniques that allowed him to gain access to user accounts at Amazon, PayPal, and a slew of other companies. He was arrested in June, as a part of a multi-state FBI sting.