We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

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on the CIA. Details about Julian Assange’s state of affairs in June of 2011, including his defense against extradition and the wearing of an electronic tag, were sourced from various press reports, such as “Julian Assange Awaits High Court Ruling on Extradition,” published by the Guardian on November 2, 2011. Details about the IRC discussions within LulzSec (first between Topiary and Sabu, then among other members of the team) were sourced from interviews with Topiary and with one other hacker associated with LulzSec who does not wish to be named. I have also seen and taken screenshots of the video of Assange taken by q, which was temporarily uploaded to YouTube. The video showed the IRC discussion between LulzSec and a panning shot of Assange looking at his laptop. Dialogue from the discussion between Sabu and q is taken from the same video, which also featured text from the IRC channel they were both in at the time. Sources close to WikiLeaks confirm that q had organized meetings in the past between Assange and other third parties via IRC, and that q is from Iceland. Regarding the filename RSA 128: RSA is a cryptographic algorithm (by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman). The 128 would refer to the key length, or the strength of encryption measured in bits. Chapter 23: Out with a Bang Details about 4chan’s reaction to LulzSec were sourced from interviews with William and Topiary. Ironically enough, LulzSecurity.com was at one point hosted in the same data center as 4chan, according to Topiary. Regarding the release of 62,000 e-mails and passwords, Topiary had uploaded the database a second time to the file hosting site MediaFire.com. However, before it was again taken down, random users had downloaded it almost 40,000 times. Further details about LulzSec’s instigation of a revived Antisec movement, and details about Topiary’s relations with Ryan, were sourced from interviews with Topiary; context for these details was provided by interviews with Sabu. Details about someone from SOCA e-mailing the Metropolitan Police about a DDoS attack were sourced from prosecutor notes, which were passed on to the arrested LulzSec members. Details about the arrest of Ryan were sourced from press reports, such as the Daily Mail article “British Teenager Charged over Cyber Attack on CIA as Pirate Group Takes Revenge on ‘Snitches Who Framed Him,’” published on June 22, 2011, and from interviews with LulzSec members. Soon after Ryan’s arrest, an Anon with links to Ryan Cleary approached Topiary on IRC and told him with dead seriousness that a photographer from the Sun was planning to fly to Holland to try to snap a photo of the “real Topiary.” Details about the Arizona police leak, and dialogue from the discussion between LulzSec founding members about disbanding, were sourced from interviews with Topiary, with some added context provided by Sabu in later interviews. Chapter 24: The Fate of Lulz The analogy of “cavemen smearing buffalo blood” over rocks was drawn from a discussion with Topiary. Details about the Script Kiddies hacking into the Twitter feed of Fox News were sourced from various news reports, such as “Fox News Hacker Tweets Obama Dead,” published by BBC News online on July 4, 2011. The group’s defacement of the Pfizer Facebook page was sourced from their posts on Twitter and from my own subsequent observations of the defaced Facebook page. Details about other hacker groups from countries such as the Philippines, Colombia, and Brazil were sourced from various stories on TheHackerNews.com. The statement that there were more than six hundred people in the AnonOps chat room #Antisec after LulzSec disbanded comes from my own observations while on the IRC network. Sabu’s statement “I’m doing the same work, more revolutionary” was sourced from my IRC interview with Sabu. Details about Topiary’s “break” from Anonymous after LulzSec disbanded were sourced from interviews with Topiary. The assertion that “several mainstream press outlets’ ears perked in envy” at Sabu’s claim of granting certain media outlets access to News of the World e-mails was sourced from news reports such as “LulzSec Claims to Have News International E-mails,” published by the Guardian on July 21, 2011. The detail about Rebekah Brooks’s husband dumping her laptop in a black garbage bag is sourced from the Guardian story “Police Examine Bag Found in Bin Near Rebekah Brooks’s Home,” published on July 18, 2011. The assertion that police across eight countries had arrested seventy-nine people in connection with activities carried out under the names Anonymous and LulzSec was sourced from various news reports about these arrests and a tally on Pastebin. Details about the looming arrest of Topiary were sourced from Topiary, with certain facts, including that about the hiring of a private plane, corroborated by news reports, such as the Daily Mail’s “Autistic Shetland Teen Held over Global Internet Hacking Spree ‘Masterminded from His Bedroom,’” published on July 31, 2011. Part 3 Chapter 25: The Real Topiary Details about Topiary’s arrest, including descriptions of his encounter with the police, were sourced from later interviews with Jake Davis. The details about the police’s visit to Jake’s mother’s home in Spalding were sourced from discussions with Jennifer Davis. Descriptions of Ms. Davis walking into the Charing Cross police station are based on my own observations after visiting the station that day. The assertion that the AnonOps chat rooms were “ablaze with rumors” are based on my own observations after visiting the IRC
The assertion that the AnonOps chat rooms were “ablaze with rumors” are based on my own observations after visiting the IRC network; Sabu’s statement that he was “pretty fucking depressed” comes from my interview with him. The statement that the name Jake had popped up in the AnonOps chat room after an error involving his VPN connection was sourced from my observations of the December 8 AnonOps public chat log database on http://blyon.com/Irc/. The rumor about the friend from Xbox forums posting “Jake from Shetland” was sourced from Sabu’s published chat log with Mike “Virus” Nieves (see chapter 26) and the Gawker story “How a Hacker Mastermind Was Brought Down by His Love of Xbox,” published on August 16, 2011. Details about VPN provider HideMyAss responding to a U.K. court order to help identify a member of LulzSec were sourced from a blog post on HideMyAss’s website entitled “LulzSec Fiasco,” published on September 23, 2011. HideMyAss did not respond to repeated requests for interviews and did not list a phone number on its website. The item about the Department of Homeland Security expecting more significant attacks from Anonymous was sourced from the department’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center bulletin published on August 1, 2011. Details about and descriptions of Jake Davis’s court appearance were sourced from my observations while attending the hearing, with added context provided by later interviews with Davis. The book Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science got a significant boost in its Amazon rankings after Jake Davis flashed its cover to the cameras, according to an interview with the book’s author, Michael Brooks. Descriptions of the propaganda images and digital posters made of Jake Davis after his court appearance were sourced from my own observations after speaking to several Anonymous supporters on AnonOps, one of whom directed me to a growing repository of these images. Details about Jake Davis’s fan mail and his life at home were sourced from interviews with Davis, which included visits to his home in Spalding, and from my own observation of some of the letters he received. Details about the raid executed by William and other members of /b/ against a sixteen-year-old girl on Facebook named Selena (not her real name) were sourced from interviews with William conducted via e-mail and in person. Davis’s meeting with William was arranged by me. I had thought for some time that it would be intriguing to observe what would happen if two people from Anonymous were to meet face-to-face. I had also wanted to arrange for an Anon and a victim of Anon— e.g., Jake Davis and Aaron Barr—to meet in person. Distance and time constraints made a meeting between Barr and Davis impractical, so the next best thing seemed to be a meeting between William and Topiary. I asked each of them if he was willing to meet the other, and after they agreed I set a date in February of 2011. On the appointed day, I met first with William before traveling with him by train to the meeting place with Davis. I accompanied them both to a restaurant, where we talked over lunch. As the two men discussed Anonymous, I asked questions and took notes. Chapter 26: The Real Sabu Details about Sabu’s cooperation with police, and his criminal misdemeanors outside the world of Anonymous and LulzSec, were sourced from his criminal indictment and from a transcript of his August 5, 2011, arraignment in New York’s U.S. District Court. Further context and description was provided by an interview with a source who had knowledge of the FBI investigation of Sabu, as well as interviews with Anonymous hackers who had worked with Sabu in the months after LulzSec disbanded and during his time as an FBI informant. All sources claimed not to have known categorically that Sabu was an informant, though they had varying degrees of suspicion. The description of Hector “Sabu” Monsegur was sourced from the Fox News report “Infamous International Hacking Group LulzSec Brought Down by Own Leader,” published on March 6, 2012, and from the New York Times story “Hacker, Informant and Party Boy of the Projects,” published on March 8, 2012. Further descriptions of Sabu were sourced from my own conversations with him online and by telephone, from my observations of his Twitter feed, and from a leaked chat log between Sabu and hacker Mike “Virus” Nieves. The chat log was published on Pastebin on August 16, 2011, and entitled “sabu vs virus aka dumb & dumber part 2.” The comprehensive dox of Sabu, which this time included a photo of Hector Monsegur, was posted by a white hat security researcher nicknamed Le Researcher, who pasted a variety of screenshots of e-mails, deface messages, and forum posts on http://ceaxx.wordpress.com/uncovered/. The assertion that hacktivism is “extremely popular in Brazil” was sourced from a report by Imperva entitled “The Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack,” published in February of 2012, as well as from my own observations of the number of press reports about cyber attacks by Anonymous in Brazil. Descriptions of and dialogue from Sabu’s interactions with sup_g, aka Jeremy Hammond, ahead of the Stratfor attack were sourced from Hector Monsegur’s criminal indictment, with further context, including details about his relations with WikiLeaks, taken from interviews with other hackers who took part in the Stratfor attack. The reference to the New York Times article in which the FBI denied they had “let [the Stratfor] attack happen” is sourced from the story “Inside the Stratfor Attack,” published on the paper’s Bits blog on March 12, 2012. Details about Donncha “Palladium” O’Cearrbhail hacking into the Gmail account of a member of the Irish national police to listen in on a call between the FBI and the Metropolitan Police were sourced from both O’Cearrbhail’s and Monsegur’s indictments. Details about Monsegur passing himself off as a federal agent to the NYPD were sourced from his criminal indictment. Chapter 27: The Real Kayla, the Real Anonymous Descriptions of Ryan Mark Ackroyd were sourced from my observations of Ackroyd at his first court appearance, on March 16, 2012.
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Begin Reading Table of Contents Cop
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his HBGary Federal account, possibl
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culture and key figures within it.
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dreadful fascination at his phone a
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Aaron Barr would never have come fa
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“nigger,” “faggot,” or just
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owns my ass.” With his other hand
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In 2008 he helped instigate Operati
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death threats and threatened to bom
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another poster described “Phase 2
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though, they were usurped by what w
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We are Legion We do not forgive We
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day in federal prison. In the meant
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Since childhood, Bailey had harbore
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oughly three hundred regular chat p
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1. Get the latest LOIC from github.
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Asperger syndrome, rarely left his
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“It’s a troll,” another organ
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had joined mentoring program iMento
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choose a unique nickname on AnonOps
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time. Kayla actually had several IR
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was headquartered and where Barr wo
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“So are we going to focus on Anon
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Starting in early January, many sup
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“Well in my lifetime I’ve perfo
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uh, actual intelligence.” There w
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definitely unimpressed—the claims
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nude photos. Four years later, an e
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“Is this a new trend :D to see wh
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network collapsed, they would move
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large notice board with paperwork a
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April 2011, while he and Sabu were
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since they had a wider array of ski
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will get in trouble and might be gr
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passwords for almost every journali
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or online for most of the day and s
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a mixture of Anons, script kiddies,
Page 76 and 77: Sabu hated white hat security firms
Page 78 and 79: “Just looked at this guy’s sour
Page 80 and 81: otnets. Topiary shot back with a se
Page 82 and 83: wasn’t Sabu. “You got the wrong
Page 84 and 85: them that he was back. Topiary at f
Page 86 and 87: websites, bigger ones. He had a rap
Page 88 and 89: “Y’all were the inspiration I n
Page 90 and 91: LulzSec. Tflow created a torrent fi
Page 92 and 93: The Fate of Lulz LulzSec’s signif
Page 94 and 95: opposite of Kayla. And yet there wa
Page 96 and 97: one of the LulzSec accounts in resp
Page 98 and 99: on the network. He decided to try t
Page 100 and 101: morning of their meeting, William
Page 102 and 103: techniques like the Cain and Abel p
Page 104 and 105: hackers in private IRC rooms. It wa
Page 106 and 107: the open at the same time: the susp
Page 108 and 109: Kayla’s story had become more imp
Page 110 and 111: Stephane Fitch, who also introduced
Page 112 and 113: writes a spoof news article about t
Page 114 and 115: following twenty names in the ranki
Page 116 and 117: to websites that showed the steps o
Page 118 and 119: Minions.” Another helpful source
Page 120 and 121: “extreme version of Calvinism”
Page 122 and 123: 2011, however, we held our first re
Page 124 and 125: that were first leaked online by Pa
Page 128 and 129: Descriptions of Ryan Mark Ackroyd w
Page 130 and 131: Parmy Olson is the London bureau ch
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