We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

used skull-and-crossbones imagery and generally took themselves too seriously.
It was not unusual in Anonymous to hop from one operation to another, reflecting the sometimes limited attention spans of its groups
and supporters. Along with Operation Metal Gear, there was Operation Wisconsin, Operation Eternal Ruin, and operations focused
on Libya and Italy, each of which had anywhere from two to a dozen people involved. In early 2011, the original version of
Operation Payback, launched against copyright companies, came back for round two by targeting more copyright-related websites.
Topiary observed, however, that its proponents kept switching targets—for instance, they called agcom.it a target, causing a few
people to be fired but failing to generate enough momentum to take the site down—providing others with a reason to move on to
something else. Frequently switching targets is one of the crucial reasons why Operation Payback had dwindled to around fifty
people in October of 2010 and nearly died out—until WikiLeaks came along by chance, and thousands of people suddenly jumped
in.
Chapter 14: Backtrace Strikes
The opening paragraphs of this chapter are sourced from interviews with Jennifer Emick, with some added details—including the name
of her Skype group, the Treehouse—coming from Anonymous-related blogs.
Details about the arrests in the Netherlands and Britain are sourced from various mainstream news reports. The U.K.’s Metropolitan
Police announced on January 27 that they had arrested five people in morning raids across the country. According to a report in The
TechHerald at the time, they were allegedly tracked with “little more than server logs and confirmation from their ISP.”
Descriptions of what Emick was finding on DigitalGangsters.com were originally sourced from Emick and corroborated by my own
observations of the website, especially its “About” page. I also interviewed a member of the forum site nicknamed Jess, who was a
close friend of the twenty-three-year-old Seattle woman on the site who went by the name Kayla and whose real name is Kayla
Anderson. Jess confirmed that the woman is not the same Kayla of LulzSec, though she and her friend considered the hacker known
as Xyrix as an acquaintance. It was most likely a coincidence, she added, that Xyrix was being connected to both a Kayla from
DigitalGangsters.com and the Kayla of LulzSec. Emick doubted this account when I put it to her in November of 2011 and believed
that there was a connection between the two Kaylas.
Incidentally, Corey “Xyrix” Barnhill has denied being Kayla, both by leaving comments on online news reports about Kayla and by emailing
me directly. The AnonOps Kayla also told me and certain members of Anonymous that she went along with rumors that she
was Xyrix because it helped obfuscate her real identity.
The descriptions of YTCracker and the story about the hack on DigitalGangsters.com were sourced from phone interviews with Bryce
“YTCracker” Case himself, as well as from my observations of the deface message that was posted on his site when Corey “Xyrix”
Barnhill, Mike “Virus” Nieves, and Justin “Null” Perras had, according to Case, switched the DigitalGangster.com domains to point
at their own servers.
My own observation of DigitalGangsters.com showed posts advertising jobs that required hacking into websites via SQL injection,
stealing databases of names and e-mail addresses, or just stealing addresses and sending them to spammers. A database with
passwords was worth more, since spammers could then send spam from legitimate addresses. Occasionally a thread would start with a
post seeking “freelancers” who could program in C, Objective-C, C#, VB, Java, and JavaScript. One post from June of 2010 had the
title “DGs [Digital Gangsters] in Washington? Be my mail man in the middle,” followed by: “Heres how it works. A delivery gets
shipped to your address, You open the package remove item, Reship the item to me in a new container with a false return address.
when item arrives you get paid. interested?”
The description of Jin-Soo Byun was sourced from interviews with Jennifer Emick and Laurelai Bailey; the note that Aaron Barr was
helping her investigation was sourced from an interview with Barr. The details about Emick setting up the initial Backtrace
investigation into Anonymous, and then tracking down “Hector Montsegur” [sic], are sourced from interviews with Emick.
Descriptions of some of Sabu’s defaces come from screenshots provided by Sabu himself as well as from a blog post by Le
Researcher, an anti-Anonymous campaigner who works with Emick. Another group that includes longtime EFnet user Kelley
Hallissey claims it doxed Sabu in December 2010 and passed his details to Backtrace in February 2011. Emick denies this.
Sabu’s statement that he was “going to drive over to [Laurelai’s] house and mess him up” was sourced from Topiary’s testimony.
The origins of the word backtrace point to one of the most notorious 4chan and Anonymous operations ever conducted. It started in July
of 2010, when 4chan’s /b/ users began trolling an eleven-year-old girl named Jessica Leonhardt. Online, she was known as Jessi
Slaughter, and was a minor e-celebrity after uploading videos of herself onto a site called StickyDrama. When other StickyDrama
users started bullying Slaughter, she filmed a series of tearful ripostes, including one in which her mustached father could be seen over
her shoulder jabbing his finger at the webcam and shouting, “You bunch of lying, no-good punks! And I know who it’s comin’ from!
Because I BACKTRACED it!” The broadside spawned a number of Internet catchphrases and memes, including “backtrace,” “Ya
done goofed,” and “Consequences will never be the same!” By February of 2011, Jessi Slaughter had been placed under police
protection and admitted to a mental institution. The following August, her father died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-three.
The dialogue among Topiary, Kayla, Tflow, and AVunit, starting with the quote “They all think i’m Xyrix!” was sourced from their
March 21, 2011, discussion on a private IRC channel called Seduce. By this point, Topiary had introduced me to Kayla (with whom I
had been communicating by e-mail) and it was in this room that I first spoke to AVunit, Tflow, and Sabu. From there I organized
separate interviews with each of them. The group was already communicating with each other in their own separate channel, and
#seduce was set up for the purpose of speaking with me and providing testimony for this book. The name Seduce came from the late-
February revelation in the #HQ chat log that Kayla would be talking to me; she quipped that “She wrote good stuff about us so far…
she talked with Topiary. he has her seduced I guess.” Later, when the group would switch to a different IRC server, they would
create another channel, named #charmy, also for talking exclusively with me. I was later told that Sabu was extremely wary of talking
to me in the #seduce channel in March, and I observed that he was rarely in the room or would make excuses to leave. On April 13,
2011, however, we held our first real interview on IRC and he became more forthcoming.