LONDON - British police filed charges Wednesday against a teenager suspected of involvement in cyberattacks on the CIA website.
Ryan Cleary, 19, has been charged with five offences under the Computer Misuse Act, police said.
One of the charges relates to bringing down the website of Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency -- the U.K.'s FBI equivalent -- using a flood of traffic, in what is known as a "distributed denial of service" attack.
The teenager is suspected of having ties to the Lulz Security hacking collective, which has recently targeted Sony, the CIA website and the U.S. Senate computer system.
Cleary was arrested Tuesday following a joint operation with the FBI. All of the charges announced Wednesday are U.K. related and it was not known if the FBI also planned to file charges.
The charges against him date to events as far back as Oct. 29 -- when Cleary is accused of attacking the website of the British Phonographic Industry. An attack on the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry followed just one month later, police said.
The timing of those two attacks appears linked to a hacking operation dubbed "Operation Payback," led by a group of hackers known as Anonymous, which targeted music sites worldwide.
