We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

Now it was clear: Sabu, Topiary, Kayla, Tflow, and Pwnsauce, five of the six core members of LulzSec (it is not known what happened to
AVunit) had been arrested. It seemed almost impossible to become a hero in Anonymous and avoid handcuffs. But did that spell the end of
Anonymous? Jake’s final tweet as Topiary had been “You cannot arrest an idea,” and it rang true. In Anonymous, there were no real leaders
but symbols and smaller groups who occasionally worked together. There were even different cultures: the old-school EFnet hackers like
Sabu who had embraced the vision of Antisec, the 4chan users like William who loved Anon because it helped him “waste a night.” And
there were those who fell somewhere in between, like Topiary, Kayla, and Tflow, who saw Anonymous as a broad means to find fulfillment,
have new experiences, and make a difference in the world in a way that suited their enjoyment of computers and the Internet. Tying
Anonymous all together and destroying it was impossible.
This was a phenomenon that came from the nascent world of memes, crowd sourcing, and social networks, things that had a viral-like
quality that could not be predicted, controlled, or stopped. As some members were arrested, others joined. The FBI said that they were
“chopping off the head of LulzSec,” but by March of 2012, after LulzSec had been disbanded for more than nine months, other hacker cells
were taking up the Antisec cause; in February of 2012 alone, supporters of Anonymous had taken credit for attacking the websites of the
CIA, Interpol, Citigroup, and a string of banks in Brazil, among other targets.
Then there was the growing international movement called “Occupy,” which emerged in September 2011 and saw tens of thousands take
to the streets in major capitals to protest social and economic inequality, often using the slogan “We are the 99%.” Activist-style supporters of
Anonymous largely showed their support for Occupy, promoting it on Twitter and blogs and wearing the V for Vendetta masks at protests.
Police had arrested more than 6,800 people in connection with the Occupy movement as of April 2012, by which time it had gone into
hiatus. But as observers marveled at how this apparently leaderless global crowd could organize itself so extensively online and in physical
demonstrations, they only had to look at Anonymous to see it had already been done before.
For the FBI, getting Sabu as an informant had been a coup, but chasing the day-to-day glut of bragging, secret discussions, conspiracies,
and threats probably soon turned into a bureaucratic nightmare. Although they had Sabu working for them for eight months, it is not clear
how instrumental he was in initially identifying any of the five hackers that were charged on March 6—at most, he may have helped drum up
charges.
Sabu was outed, but Anonymous seemed to refuse to be destroyed. Later that evening on March 6, a group of hackers announced that
Anonymous had hacked into and defaced the website of Panda Securities, the same IT company that had observed the Anonymous DDoS
attacks on PayPal in December of 2010. Their message: it isn’t over.
Then, over the subsequent days, the hackers who had worked with Sabu brainstormed about new ways to work together.
“Sabu’s shit makes things different now,” said one. “We mistrust a lot more.” By mid-March the hackers were discussing other methods of
talking to one other besides IRC and how they could raise standards for new people to join private discussions. Anonymous as an activist
movement would stay public, but the hacking activities would go farther underground. Anonymous had emerged from the shadows, the
hacker added, and it would go back into the dark for a while. “But don’t worry. We exist.”
Anonymous had already been changing. The software tools its supporters used, for instance, were becoming easier to disseminate. When
members of Anonymous launched DDoS attacks on several companies in January of 2012 to protest the shutdown of Megaupload, a videostreaming
site, they didn’t use the traditional LOIC program. There was no need to download anything. By then, supporters could launch
LOIC directly from a web browser. That meant that by posting a link on Twitter or Facebook, organizers tricked hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of oblivious web surfers into joining the attack. The attack method, dubbed mobile LOIC by digital security company Imperva,
was used as early as August of 2011 in the first of several DDoS attacks against the Vatican and became more popular over the following
months.
By early 2012, Anonymous attacks were no longer carried out by thousands of volunteers, as with the Payback attacks for WikiLeaks. Just
like Chanology’s real-world protests, they were a one-off, as if Anonymous was learning what worked and what didn’t. Anonymous was
shifting from mass gatherings and DDoS attacks to small groups stealing data, like LulzSec. For this, more were using the web tool Havij.
After LulzSec used it to collate data during the PBS heist, a splinter group called CabinCr3w used Havij (or something like it) to expose the
personal data of five hundred police officers in Utah, while other Anons used Havij to try to steal data from the Vatican in August 2011.
Imperva’s studies showed that only a year after its creation by what are believed to be Iranian programmers, Havij had become, by the
summer of 2012, one of the most popular tools for SQL injection attacks. The program was so simple that one Imperva executive taught his
eleven-year-old how to use it in fifteen minutes. The free-to-download tool performed SQLi automatically, even filtering data into helpful
categories like “Passwords” and “Credit card numbers.” With the right free programs and just a few clicks, it seemed almost anyone could be
a hacker.
Of course, keeping the idea of Anonymous alive would be complicated. The media, police, and even the hackers themselves had their own
concepts of what it really was: an idea, a movement, a criminal organization, and other things besides. By March of 2012, the public and
parts of the media still seemed to think that Anonymous was a very large group that made plans and carried them out in an orderly way.
Though the notion was deeply misguided, it was understandable. A newfangled phenomenon like Anonymous, born of the Internet itself,
was something society would struggle to make sense of at first. On top of that, the mystery surrounding what really happened inside the hivemind
had left just enough room for the public to create its own versions of the Anonymous narrative, just as when Topiary had spun a vague
tale about getting raided when he wanted to leave AnonOps. Anonymous wasn’t just a group or a process; it was also a story that people
were telling themselves about how the Internet was fighting back. Anons could grab headlines by simply tweeting a threat, which is why the
power of Anonymous spoke to the power of myth. Anonymous was another example of social engineering, on a mass scale. It was not too
dissimilar from Kayla herself.
Over the past few years, the online entity Kayla had been telling her friends different stories about who she was in real life, tempting them
to try to piece together a puzzle of her real identity. A teenage girl who hated her father; a teenage girl who loved him. In the end, though, her
hacker colleagues stopped being interested in the truth.
“We told her we’d prefer her to lie to us,” one longtime friend remembered. “We all loved the story. I don’t think we cared if it was true or
not.” Like children wanting to keep the magic of Santa Claus alive a little longer after starting to doubt his existence, to her hacker friends,
Kayla’s story had become more important than the truth itself.