Cody Kretsinger, 23, was arrested Thursday morning on hacking and conspiracy charges. Prosecutors say he was "Recursion," an LulzSec hacker who used a database attack technique called SQL injection to . Kretsinger allegedly provided data that was used in a mammoth June 2, 2011, data dump by LulzSec that included coupon codes along with email addresses and passwords belonging to Sony customers.

At the time that LulzSec posted its data, Sony was already recovering from a devastating break-in to its PlayStation Network. That intrusion knocked the service offline for more than two months and (US$183 million) to clean up.

"The extent of damage caused by the compromise at Sony Pictures is under investigation," the FBI said Thursday in a statement.

Sony's heavy-handed response to the release of "jailbreak" code for its PS3 console, which could be used to run unauthorized software on the device, had made the company the enemy of hackers everywhere, and the LulzSec hackers were not the only ones to go after the company's computer systems.

LulzSec had a brief run of Internet mayhem earlier this year, breaking into websites belonging to corporations and law enforcement agencies and then posting the data publicly with gleeful disregard to any consequences.