We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

September of 2011 via e-mail and Internet Relay Chat. The rumor about stabbing her webcam with a knife came from an online
interview with Topiary. Also throughout the book, details about Topiary come from online, phone, and face-to-face interviews with
him (Jake Davis) between December of 2010 and the summer of 2012. Details about Tflow come from interviews with Topiary and
Tflow himself; the information that Tflow had invited Sabu and Topiary into the secret IRC channel come from Topiary, one other
hacker who wished to remain anonymous, and Sabu himself. Details of how the hackers planned the HBGary attack, including how
they used the website HashKiller to crack the company’s passwords, came from interviews with Topiary conducted via IRC and
Skype (voice only).
Details of Barr’s research on Anonymous, including the “hasty notes like ‘Mmxanon—states…ghetto,’” came from his research notes,
which were posted online by the hackers.
Dialogue between Barr and the hackers, including with CommanderX, comes from chat logs that were published online—partly via the
Web tool Pastebin, and also on the Ars Technica article “(Virtually) Face to Face: How Aaron Barr Revealed Himself to
Anonymous,” by Nate Anderson. The dialogue between Barr and Topiary, which ends “Die in a fire. You’re done” comes from a
snippet of the chat log that was cut and pasted to a Skype conversation between me and Topiary a few days after the attack. Further
details about the attack came from interviews with Jake Davis, as well as online interviews with Sabu, Kayla, and other hacker
sources. Details of the February 2011 Super Bowl come from various news reports and from my viewing of the actual game while I
was following online developments of the HBGary Federal attack. Although I had already been interviewing Topiary on a regular
basis, the attack led to my being introduced to others in the group—first Kayla, then Sabu, then Tflow.
SQL reads like a stream of formulas. An example is: “Select creditcard from person where name=SMITH.” If someone were to perform
an SQL injection attack, they might inject code saying, “Select a from b where a=SMITH.”
How did the hackers know that Barr was CogAnon? Topiary later explained that, almost immediately after seeing the Financial Times
story and breaking into the HBGary Federal network, one of them had seen that his internal e-mail headers listed the IP address of his
VPN (virtual private network). Barr had used this same VPN connection to log into an Internet Relay Chat network used by
Anonymous, known as AnonOps. The hackers only had to hand over the IP address to one of the chat network operators, who ran a
quick search. Sure enough, the name CogAnon popped up.
Chapter 2: William and the Roots of Anonymous
Details about how Christopher Poole created 4chan come from an interview that Poole gave to the New York Times Bits blog. The
article, entitled “One on One: Christopher Poole, Founder of 4chan,” was published on March 19, 2010.
I sourced the information on Japan’s 2chan from the 2004 New York Times article “Japanese Find a Forum to Vent Most-Secret
Feelings” and Wired’s May 2008 story “Meet Hiroyuki Nishimura, the Bad Boy of the Japanese Internet.”
Further details about the development of 4chan, such as its “TWO TIMES THE CHAN” announcement on Something Awful, come
from an article on 4chan history by Web developer Jonathan Drain, on jonnydigital.com. Moot’s referral to /b/ as a “retard bin” comes
from an announcement on the 4chan “news” page, 4chan.org/news?all, on October 2, 2003.
Though the story of Shii’s enforcement of anonymity on 4chan is relatively well known among image board users, the details come
from testimony provided on Shii’s website, shii.org.
Details about the life, viewpoints, and exploits of the young man named in this book as William come from scores of e-mails and several
face-to-face meetings, all taking place between February of 2011 and the summer of 2012. After telling me—in a meeting that took
place in July of 2011—the story of hacking “Jen’s” (not her real name) PhotoBucket account, William e-mailed me photos of Jen and
“Joshua Dean Scott.” I have the images on file. Scott’s photo, for instance, shows him holding a piece of paper reading “‘Jen’ owns
my ass 3/2/11.” He wears a black baseball cap, a lip ring, and a black Converse shoe on top of his head, along with a slight smile. On
several occasions William e-mailed me screenshots of the conversations he was having with the people he trolled on Facebook, as
well as the raid threads he sometimes participated in on /b/, to corroborate his stories. The pranks and online intimidation of
individuals described in this book are only a small fraction of the many nightly exploits that William alerted me to.
Further details about /b/ and 4chan were sourced from the meme repositories Encyclopedia Dramatica (now redirecting to
ohinternet.com) and KnowYourMeme.com, as well as interviews with Jake Davis.
Chapter 3: Everybody Get In Here
The vast majority of details about Topiary’s early childhood and life on Shetland come from online and face-to-face interviews with
Topiary (Jake Davis) himself, with further details and corroboration coming from discussions with his mother, Jennifer Davis, after
his arrest. As of mid-April he was living in her home on bail, awaiting a plea and case management hearing at a British crown court
on May 11, 2012. A few key details, such as the death of his stepfather, Alexander “Allie” Spence, were corroborated by newspaper
reports. Descriptions of the scenery and lack of modern shops in Shetland come from my own one-day visit to Lerwick, where I first
met Davis in late June 2011.
Details of Davis’s frequent prank calls to the Applebee’s restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, are a result of interviews with Davis himself.
Though he could not provide recordings of the Applebee’s calls, he did provide audio files of other similar prank calls.
A common feature of /b/ raids was a “surge” of users against an online target, the idea usually being to overwhelm them. Among the
examples provided are spamming shock photos on a forum; this is a common tactic of /b/ users, and was most recently perpetrated on
the comedy site 9gag. The raid in which /b/ warped the votes for Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” took place in 2009, when
4chan users famously teamed together to program a bot that would crank out fake votes that put Christopher “moot” Poole at the top
of Time’s ranking. As well as giving him an unfeasible sixteen million votes, they gamed the system so that the first letters of the
following twenty names in the ranking spelled out the words “Marblecake also the game.” This was thought to be a reference to the