We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

2011, however, we held our first real interview on IRC and he became more forthcoming.
It is unclear if “Christopher Ellison,” the name associated with AVunit in Backtrace’s final document, was correct or not. There have
been no press reports or police announcements related to the arrest of someone connected to the nickname, and no information about
the whereabouts of the real AVunit as of mid-April 2012.
The study by Francois Paget was published on October 21, 2011, in a McAfee blog post entitled “The Rise and Fall of Anonymous.”
The detail about the FBI contacting Jennifer Emick comes from conversations with Emick. The additional point that the FBI needed to
wait to corroborate Sabu’s identity and gather enough evidence to threaten him with a long sentence was sourced from the
FoxNews.com report “Infamous International Hacking Group LulzSec Brought Down by Own Leader,” published on March 6,
2012.
Laurelai Bailey hadn’t been the only log leaker. Less damaging, though still embarrassing, was a leak from freelance television and Web
journalist Matthew Keys, who had been given access to #InternetFeds from December of 2010 to January 6, 2011, when he was
banned after the channel’s members suspected him of leaking information to the Guardian. Sabu later claimed that Keys had given
away administrator access to the online publishing system of Tribune, his former employer, in return for the chance to “hang out in
our channel.” Keys denies this.
A note on making IRC channels: generally, the person who comes up with the idea for a channel is the person who creates the channel.
Creators can make channels more secure by adding commands like +isPu and +k to gain more control of who comes in. But
sometimes the best way to make a channel secure is to make it completely open, with no invite policy at all, and to keep switching
between different channels every day or two. Making a channel “invite only” is “like holding a red flag in front of a bull,” according
to AVunit, who added that this was why he and his the team avoided invite-only policies. To find each other, team members would
use normal IRC queries, check which channel was active, or just type in the relevant channel in IRC and rejoin the discussion.
It’s worth noting that Backtrace itself was the subject of numerous doxing episodes. From at least the spring of 2011, a number of
Anonymous supporters unveiled its members as Jennifer Emick, Jin-Soo Byun, and John Rubenstein, publishing their home
addresses, telephone numbers, some family details, and other online profiles on the web tool Pastebin.
Chapter 15: Breaking Away
The descriptions of “three ways to respond to a dox” were derived from my conversations with Topiary and my observations of the way
Anonymous supporters, such as Ryan Cleary, reacted to having their true identities unveiled. Further details about “drama” in
Anonymous and the culture bred through the morass of channels on IRC were sourced from my conversations with adherents of
Anonymous and my own observations. The detail about Aaron Barr’s idea for getting into private coding channels, as well as the
description in this chapter of “No,” come from Topiary’s testimony. The details of Renee Haefer’s FBI raid were sourced from an
interview that Haefer gave to Gawker for an online story entitled “An Interview with a Target of the FBI’s Anonymous Probe,”
published on February 11, 2011. Details on the five Britons arrested on January 27 are sourced from a Metropolitan Police
announcement and from news reports.
The paragraphs detailing Topiary’s elaborate getaway were sourced from interviews with Topiary himself. I have edited the faked log
substantially for brevity; the log had mentioned that Topiary’s wireless router had been left on. This was meant to cause further
confusion among the hundreds of regular users on AnonOps, because routers were the number one item that was looked for in a raid.
The ruse almost got too elaborate. One online female friend was already freaking out so much that she had tried contacting Topiary’s
then-girlfriend, a Canadian girl he had met online about three years prior. Problematically, this friend then let slip to others that
Topiary’s girlfriend existed. Until then, he had been trying to insulate his girlfriend from his activities with Anonymous, so that she
would not be roped in as a co-conspirator if he were ever arrested. To fix this problem, he wrote up another faked message, this time
from his girlfriend, hinting that she was suddenly jealous of the worried female friend. The suggestion distracted the girl enough from
suspecting the truth: that Topiary had not been arrested but had broken away from Anonymous.
Quotes from the Anonymous press release directed at Sony were sourced from the press release itself, which is still available on
AnonNews.org. Details of William’s involvement in OpSony come from interviews with him. William also e-mailed me a link to
some of the handiwork of SonyRecon, including Sony CEO Howard Stringer’s old and current home addresses in New York, his
wife’s name, the names of his children, and the name of his son’s old school. The post is still online at JustPaste.
The details about Sony’s lawsuit against George Hotz come from various mainstream news reports.
“Angering millions of gamers around the world” is my interpretation of myriad angry comments on forums for gamers as well as on the
official PlayStation Network website, which contains statements showing that the PSN is used by tens of millions of people.
Sony’s eight-page letter to the U.S. House of Representatives dated May 3, 2011, is viewable on Flickr.
The publication of 653 nicknames and IP addresses on AnonOps was pasted in a public document online, which I have seen and which
was brought to light by various news reporters, including by Forbes’s Andy Greenberg. His story “Mutiny Within Anonymous May
Have Exposed Hackers’ IP Addresses” was published on May 9, 2011. I made the point that “AnonOps IRC became a ghost town”
as a result of my own and Topiary’s observations of the network. The statement by various AnonOps operators that they were
“profoundly sorry for this drama” was posted and reposted on various blogs. The original post also mentioned that AnonOps would
“stage a comeback and return to full strength eventually.” Ryan Cleary, who was behind the IP leak, gave an interview to the tech
blog thinq_, saying that the operators behind AnonOps were “publicity hungry” and had “begun engaging in operations simply to
grab headlines” and “feed their own egos.” “They just like seeing things destroyed,” thinq_ quoted Ryan as saying.
I saw the dox file about Ryan when it was first posted online. It included his real address in Wickford, Essex, his cell phone number,
and the names and ages of his parents. The dox page said that Ryan had been “owned” by Evo, adding “Who’s the ‘pet’ now, bitch?”
The document also gave “shouts,” or acknowledgments, to Sabu, Kayla, Owen, #krack, and all of AnonOps.
The assertion that Anonymous was “starting to look like a joke” comes from my own observations as well as discussions with