A 21-year-old hacker based in the US has been jailed for hacking the website of Japanese entertainment giant Sony Pictures. 

Raynaldo Rivera, who was a member of the LulzSec hacking group that claimed a number of victims in 2011, pleaded guilty last year to "conspiring to cause damage to a protected computer".

A statement from the FBI said that Rivera and former college mater Cody Kretsinger had used a SQL injection on Sony Pictures' website to extract personal data of 138,000 of its customer. The pair published the information on the Internet. 

The statement quotes court documents in which LulzSec claimed its motivation was the "raw, uninterrupted, chaotic thrill of entertainment and anarchy” and that it published personal data “so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it".

Earlier this year, three UK-based members of LulzSec pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges, related to its attacks on targets including Sony, News International and the NHS. 

Ryan Cleary, 21, was jailed for two years and eight months, the longest sentence given to a hacker in the UK. In June, however, it was reported that he is due to be released imminently.