8 Most Notorious Cybercrime Busts Of 20118 Most Notorious Cybercrime Busts Of 2011

While there are plenty of elusive hackers that will forever manage to outrun the law, the good guys scored some impressive arrests, indictments, and convictions in 2011. Here are some of the highest profile cases to hit the headlines this year.

1. Anonymous and LulzSec Hacker: Ryan Cleary
Police raided the home of 19-year-old Brit Ryan Cleary and arrested him this summer for allegedly using distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to take down the British Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) website this year, plus websites for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the British Phonographic Industry, last year.

His arrest was heralded by authorities as part of a crackdown against LulzSec, but the loosely organized group associated with Anonymous disavowed him as its leader. Cleary for sure had some affiliation with Anonymous, though. Acrimony between him and other Anonymous members for hacking into the group's AnonOps website and exposing its members IP addresses led to Anonymous exposing Cleary's full name, address, phone number, and IP on its site. These details were used by authorities to eventually find, arrest, and indict him.

2. Ivy League Academic Content Turbo Downloader: Aaron Swartz
A programmer and fellow at Harvard University's Safra Center for Ethics, 24-year-old Aaron Swartz faced indictment this year after he downloaded more than 4 million academic articles from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) network connection to Jstor, an online academic repository. Swartz used anonymous logins on the network in September 2010, and actively worked to mask his logins when MIT and Jstor tried to stop the massive drain of copyrighted material.

After Jstor shut down access to its database from the entire MIT network, Swartz visited the campus and directly plugged in a laptop to the infrastructure at an MIT networking room and left it hidden there as it downloaded more content. It was this visit in the flesh that got him nabbed; authorities had been tipped off by an IT admin about the laptop and, after searching the laptop, left it there--along with a hidden webcam--to catch Swartz when he came back for his computer.

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