UK teen arrested over Anonymous, LulzSec web hacking

British police investigating cyber crimes have arrested a 19-year-old man on suspicion of being a member of two prominent web hacking groups.

The teenager, arrested Wednesday on the Shetland Islands, is suspected of using the online persona Topiary, which poses as a mouthpiece for the LulzSec and Anonymous groups, the BBC reports.

A second teenager, aged 17, is being questioned by police and a search is being carried out on a house in Lincolnshire, England.

The two loosely-organized groups of hackers claim to have been behind recent attacks on the websites of the CIA, MasterCard, Visa, Sony’s online gaming system, Apple, and media group News International.

LulzSec announced in June that it was disbanding.

Anonymous pledged its support for WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, warning earlier this year that it would target the credit card and online payment companies who had stopped facilitating donations to the documents leaking site.

Earlier in July, the FBI searched locations in New York and California in connection with a joint international investigation into the hacking. As part of that operation, the FBI arrested 16 people in California, New Jersey and Florida.

(More Global Post coverage of web hacking: Hacker group "Anonymous" announces cyberattacks (video))