We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

was mentioned in an Internet Relay Chat interview with the hacker on May 23, 2011, in which she described in detail how she and a
group of online friends in the IRC channel #gnosis carried out their hack over the course of several months. Confirmation of the
existence of Kayla’s “tr0ll” IRC network came from archived web pages and Pastebin posts that mention the network, and a source
who did not wish to be named. In addition to telling me about the “vulnerability in the servers hosting Gawker.com,” Kayla explained
that she and the other hackers managed to obtain user and password details for the site’s root, MySQL. These are key features that
gave them almost unfettered access to the website’s database.
The vulnerability that Kayla found in the United Nations website was shown to me in an IRC chat with Kayla in the summer of 2011.
Dialogue from #InternetFeds came from screenshots of the private IRC channel e-mailed to me by Matthew Keys.
Regarding the WikiLeaks IRC network, where Kayla first met q, anyone could access it via a browser at chat.wikileaks.org. Several
sources close to WikiLeaks confirm q (real name known but not disclosed here) had habitually lied to supporters, and that he and
Assange were close, like a “stepson to Assange,” according to one.
Chapter 11: The Aftermath
The opening paragraphs of this chapter are sourced primarily from phone interviews with Aaron Barr. I have seen the comment about
Barr’s children that prompted him and his wife to temporarily flee their home on Reddit.
Details about HBGary Inc.’s hiring of law firm Zwillinger & Genetski are sourced from phone interviews with lawyers Marc Zwillinger
and Jennifer Granick. The detail about Ted Vera’s and Greg Hoglund’s passwords came from interviews with Topiary.
The subsequent quotes from Aaron Barr are sourced from a phone interview with Barr that took place early that Monday morning, just
hours after the Super Bowl Sunday attack. HBGary's open letter was until recently viewable here: http://www.hbgary.com/openletter-from-hbgary.
The hackers stored the social security numbers of HBGary employees and other data on a private Web text application called Pirate Pad,
which anyone from the group could edit. The online document was later deleted. Stolen data like this often wound up gathering dust
somewhere in the cloud, or on someone’s computer—forgotten until an arrest turned it into evidence.
The account of Kayla informing Laurelai Bailey of the HBGary attack and then inviting her into the private IRC channel for the
company’s attackers, #HQ, is sourced from interviews with Bailey. Those interviews were also the source for details about Barr’s
controversial proposals to Hunton & Williams. In order to stumble upon Barr’s all-important WikiLeaks connection, Laurelai had to
first port Barr’s published e-mails onto an e-mail client called Thunderbird, then transfer them to Gmail. This allowed her to search
through the e-mails using key words like “WikiLeaks.”
The notion that Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla didn’t know about the anti-WikiLeaks proposals in the days immediately after the attack were
conveyed to me by Topiary, who I was interviewing at the time. I had also been following developments after the attack and noticing
that his small group was trawling through Barr’s e-mails, looking for something controversial, before Laurelai spotted the motherlode.
Dialogue between the group in the #HQ room comes from logs that were eventually leaked by Laurelai to Jennifer Emick (see chapter
14). Details about the publication of the HBGary e-mails and snippets of content were sourced from the HBGary viewer itself,
http://hbgary.anonleaks.ru (now offline).
Details about the investigation into HBGary, its partners, and their military contracts by U.S. congressman Hank Johnson were
confirmed in a phone interview with Johnson on March 23, 2011. I first heard about the investigation on March 17, when, late that
evening, Topiary saw a Wired story saying that Congressman Johnson had started investigating the U.S. military’s contracts with
HBGary Federal, Palantir Technologies, and Berico Technologies. Soon after, at least ten Democrats from the House of
Representatives had signed a petition to launch an investigation into Hunton & Williams and the three security firms.
The “growing sense of unease” among the hackers comes from observations of their sometimes paranoid conversations in #HQ as well
as from testimony by Topiary, who was also the source for the information about the regular phone calls with Sabu and the coded
greeting “This is David Davidson.” Sabu’s mistrust of Laurelai is clear from his comments in #HQ, but was also corroborated by
testimony from Topiary.
Jennifer Emick has confirmed that she was behind the Twitter handle @FakeGreggHoush; this has been an open secret in Anonymous
since Backtrace was doxed in the early summer of 2011. I relied on interviews with both Emick and Bailey to piece together how and
why Bailey ended up passing her the #HQ logs.
Part 2
Chapter 12: Finding a Voice
The opening paragraph, describing Topiary’s popularity on AnonOps, including details such as the number of private messages he was
regularly receiving, are sourced from interviews with Topiary as well as from observations of chat logs, IRC conversations, and
statistics showing the number of times people were reaching out to him through Twitter. The detail about requests to hit various
targets, such as Facebook, also comes from those interviews. According to Topiary, people sometimes directly e-mailed supporters in
AnonOps or sent messages to certain representative blogs. It was difficult to track the way Anonymous chose its targets, since it was
often done chaotically, spontaneously, and behind the scenes. However, for the most part, target requests that came from outside
Anonymous were rarely pursued.
Details about Westboro Baptist Church are sourced from various news reports as well as from Louis Theroux’s engrossing BBC
documentary The Most Hated Family in America, first aired in 2007. The detail that Nate Phelps had accused his father, Fred, of
abuse is sourced from a number of press reports including Nate Phelps’s official website, which in its “Bio” page refers to his father’s
“extreme version of Calvinism” and “extreme physical punishments and abuse.”