Matthew Keys, a deputy social media editor at Thomson Reuters, has been charged in an indictment for allegedly conspiring with members of the hacker group “Anonymous” to hack into a Tribune Company website, the Justice Department announced today.
Keys, a former web producer for the Tribune Co-owned television station KTXL FOX 40, in Sacramento, Calif., was charged with providing members of the group with log-in credentials for a computer server belonging to the Tribune Co., according to the DoJ’s press release.
In case you’d like to read the indictment, here it is.
Quick statement: Matt’s a good friend, and we’ve worked closely together for a couple of years, bouncing ideas off of one another and the whole bit. I talked to him three hours ago. We had no knowledge of this situation, and offer no other statement other than to hope that one of our favorite people is OK. Good luck, Matt. — Ernie @ SFB
Like Ernie, I had absolutely zero knowledge of this situation, and didn’t even really have much/any contact with Matt at this point in time. In fact, I’m fairly certain he’d already started with Thomson Reuters by the time I started working with SFB.
That said, I’d certainly consider the guy a friend (considering he helped me land my first writing gig), and hope that things don’t turn out nearly as bad for Matt as the possible sentence suggests. A decade in prison for this would be beyond unreasonable.
Scott
