We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

“Is everyone excited by this news?” Later he added: “Message to Interpol: SUCK MY DICK.”
But many people in Anonymous had their suspicions about Sabu. Why had everyone else who had founded LulzSec been caught while
the loudmouthed ringleader who was widely known to live in New York and be of Puerto Rican descent was still at large?
Among the more suspicious was Mike “Virus” Nieves, a hacker whom Sabu had collaborated with during LulzSec. On August 16, a day
after Sabu’s second court appearance, where he had agreed in writing to work for the FBI, Virus accused Sabu outright of being a snitch.
The conversation started when Sabu first approached Virus and made the veiled accusation that a friend of Virus’s was an informant. Virus
saw through this deliberate tactic straightaway. It was a typical strategy among hacker informants: to faze someone who suspected you of
being a snitch, you accused him of being a snitch. Their long and eventually hostile chat took place two weeks after Jake Davis had walked
out of his first court appearance.
“Regarding Topiary,” Virus told him. “You ratted him out. It’s so obvious, Sabu.”
“You better watch your fucking mouth because I’m not a rat,” Sabu wrote back. “And I definitely didn’t rat my own boy.” Virus wasn’t
listening.
“I can spot a rodent a mile away,” he said, adding for good measure, “‘Antisec,’ what a fucking joke.”
“For a fucking joke it’s doing more mayhem than it did a decade ago,” Sabu retorted.
“You don’t even get what Antisec was about,” said Virus. “You’re not owning whitehats. Just dumbass foreign .govs.”
“I was actually involved,” said Sabu. “Big difference man. I don’t sit here and run automated tools. I’m a seasoned security researcher
going back to mid-to-late 90s.”
“You’re a low-level blackhat that got owned,” Virus shot back. “I’m done being your friend. You’re way too shady and I’m too old for
this childish crap. Your lame-ass Antisec movement is hitting anything it can.” In truth, Sabu’s Antisec followers were often thwarted when
they tried to hit out at “anything they could.” The FBI was taking advantage of Sabu’s cult-leader status by following up each hacker who
presented a vulnerability to his mentor in the hope of a pat on the head. Sabu sometimes received more than two dozen vulnerabilities a day,
and each time he would alert his FBI handlers. By August of 2011, he had helped the FBI patch a hundred and fifty vulnerabilities in
computer networks that other hackers were targeting or was at least helping to mitigate the damage. Over the coming months, he would
reportedly assist in alerting about three hundred government and corporate organizations about potential attacks by hackers with Anonymous,
allowing them to patch flaws in their networks.
As Virus brought his standoff with Sabu to an end, he waxed pragmatic about what Sabu was probably doing. “Quite frankly, I don’t care
if you’re working with the Feds to clean up the mess you created and getting your so called ‘friends’ arrested,” he said. “It’s human nature.”
“My nigga,” said Sabu. “You seriously need to stop saying that.”
“Or?”
“We’ll meet up in Manhattan and talk it out face to face.”
“I know your tactics, and you won’t gain access to any of my shit,” said Virus.
“Bro, you know me less than the Feds do,” Sabu said, momentarily hinting at his working relationship the FBI. “But let’s be real.”
The two went back and forth about how offensive snitch was before Sabu observed, “You’re talking a lot of shit, like you have some issue
with me. I always gave you mad love even from the first day I met you.”
“I don’t care for your love,” said Virus with finality. “There is no ‘love’ on the internet.” This seemed to ring true above all else. Sabu may
have been a skilled rooter who could find network vulnerabilities and exploit them, but his greatest skill was hacking into people’s minds. He
lied to the very team members he had brought together and led, all the while helping the police build up charges against them and corroborate
their identities. All the more impressive was that Sabu’s charisma and lies were so effective that other hackers continued working with him,
even after Topiary, Tflow, and Kayla were arrested, and even as other hackers remained suspicious of him. It was even said to be an open
secret among hackers in New York City that “Sabu” was Monsegur, with one rumor doing the rounds that local hackers had sprayed graffiti
on his building.
On the same day as Sabu’s confrontation with Mike Virus, a group of self-styled anti-Anonymous investigators published a blog post
claiming to dox Sabu. This time it included a photo of a large Latino-looking man in his late twenties, wearing a leather jacket and a hat. The
photo was of Monsegur. It also showed a detailed history of his exploits, and his IP address. It was perhaps the most comprehensive dox to
date. The following day, August 17, Sabu posted a cryptic message on Twitter, invoking a quote from the movie The Usual Suspects about
the film’s mythical bad guy, Keyser Söze: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And like that…
he is gone.” For the next few weeks, nobody heard a peep from Sabu on public IRC or Twitter. Most assumed that he had either fled or been
caught. Then exactly a month later, on September 17, he started tweeting again, starting with:
“They tried to snitch me out, troll me, dox every one around me, bait me into endless arguments but there’s one thing they can’t do: STOP
ME!”
All at once, Sabu dived back into the world of Anonymous and Antisec, jumping into conversations on public IRC channels and asking to
hear reports from other Antisec hackers. For the most part, he didn’t join in any attacks. Other hackers close to Sabu at the time do not
remember him hacking anything for the months after he came back. They knew that he was bragging publicly on Twitter about attacks he
had carried out but assumed this was part of his role as a mouthpiece for Anonymous and Antisec. Sabu instead pushed the “younger ones”
with Anonymous by praising them and offering to help facilitate attacks, one source said.
At one point, for instance, he offered to help Anonymous hackers in Brazil get root access to government servers. (Hacktivism is extremely
popular in Brazil, in part because the country has the highest rate of Twitter usage and also because of long-standing controversy over
government corruption.) Sabu acted as the mediator, talking to the Brazilian hacktivists, then telling his crew of hackers what the Brazilians
wanted to deface. His crew rooted the Brazilian servers and then sent Sabu the login credentials to pass on to the Brazilian hackers.
“We can’t remember one [hack] he did, even before he got busted,” said one hacker who had been working with Sabu from at least late
2011. “He liked to say he did it all. He did not.”
It is unclear to what extent Sabu was allowed to hack with impunity during his time assisting the FBI. There are different accounts. Some
say that in his role to corroborate the public claims by Anonymous that a company or government agency had been hacked, he would enter
the targeted network and check that the vulnerability was there. Others have said he would simply check the claims out by talking to other
hackers in private IRC rooms. It was probably a bit of both. For the most part, he was either giving advice, barking orders, or trying to keep