We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

friend. That was Kayla—lying so that she didn’t have to upset people.
Kayla claimed that, along with being a sixteen-year-old girl, her parents had split when she was eleven. The story went that her father had
been the more stable parent and taken custody, then moved with her to a remote town where there were few kids Kayla’s age nearby. With
little else to do, she started chatting with her old friends on MSN Messenger, logging in with her real name (which she said was also “Kayla”)
and other credentials. Her father, she said, was a software engineer who worked from home, and the house was littered with books on
computer programming, Linux Kernel, Intel, and networking. She started reading his books and asking him questions about what he did.
Encouraged by her enthusiasm, he sat with her in front of a computer and showed her how to find bugs in C source code and exploit them,
then how to bypass them. Soon she was immersing herself in scripting languages like Perl, Python, and PHP, learning how to attack Web
databases with the SQL injection method. It was mostly harmless, but by the time she was fourteen, Kayla claimed she was writing scripts
that could automate cyber attacks.
It had all been harmless, “until I went looking for so-called hacking forums,” Kayla said. “I registered at some of them and they were all,
‘Go away little girl this isn’t for you.’ Fair enough I was only 14 but it made me so angry!”
Using some of the skills she had picked up from her dad and online research, she claimed she hacked into one forum site and deleted much
of its contents using SQL injection. It was an attack unlike any the regulars had seen before.
“Wow you’re only 14 and you can do this?” Kayla recalled one of the hackers there saying. He invited Kayla into the more exclusive chat
channels on EFnet, one of the oldest Internet Relay Chat networks. The forum user saw potential in Kayla, gave her tips, and pushed her to
read more books on programming so she could learn more.
“It got kinda weird because I started meeting some shady people,” she said, referring to purely online meetings. “One guy was much older
than me, like a lot older and had a weird crush on me. I guess a girl hacker is every guy hacker’s dream? Maybe? The only thing was he was
27 and I was only 14, so yeah, weird! I’m so sick of people thinking only old people are smart, and just because I’m young anything I say
doesn’t count?”
Though Kayla insisted that online life was hard because she was female, the opposite was more likely true. The real person behind her
nickname was guaranteed to get more attention and more opportunities to hack others by being a friendly and mysterious girl. Females were a
rare sight on image boards and hacking forums; hence the online catchphrase “There are no girls on the Internet,” and why posing as a girl
has been a popular tactic for Internet trolls for years. But this didn’t spell an upper hand for genuine females. If they revealed their sex on an
image board like /b/ they were often met with misogynistic comments like “Tits or GTFO”—that is, “Show your tits or get the fuck out.”
Many girls on image boards would often appease these calls by going down the route of becoming “camwhores,” stripping or performing
sexual acts on webcam for attention and acceptance. The other option was to simply hide their sex and be male online. With so much ego and
reputation at stake, identifying someone’s gender on a board like /b/ could be almost impossible, but it made sense to be suspicious of those
claiming outright to be young women. This was why number 29 of the Rules of the Internet said that on the Internet “all girls are men and all
kids are undercover FBI agents.” Kayla probably wasn’t an FBI agent, but certainly someone with an elaborate backstory, and one that
perhaps hinted at who she really was in real life.
Kayla claimed that, growing up, other kids her age would hang out on street corners while she stayed at home memorizing Windows
opcodes, auditing source code, and accepting invitations into private IRC channels where she could learn more from other hackers. She liked
using her skills to play tricks on others. A common prank was to “dump” or publish a person’s MySQL database, essentially a map for other
hackers to try to steal their e-mails or documents. The ultimate goal was to dox someone, discovering and then posting his or her real-life
personal details online.
Trolling and Internet vigilantism had been around for some time already, but they were becoming increasingly popular in 2008, and it’s no
coincidence that at around the same time, anonymizing technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Tor were also becoming
popular. These allowed hackers and regular 4chan users like William to hide their IP addresses, the unique number, typically long with
several decimals, assigned to every computer connected to the Internet. Part of the address could correspond to the network the device was
part of, and the rest to the individual. If you could figure out someone’s real IP address, you could usually get his or her real name and real
address. But if that person was using a VPN, then people (like the police, or rival hackers) trying to “get their dox” would find a fake IP
address, sometimes pointing to another computer in another country.
Trolling was like pranking, but ultimately it meant causing some sort of emotional distress to someone else, often through embarrassment
or fear. For some people who couldn’t be accepted in the real world, trolling was an easy route to power and one-upmanship. After
displaying her skills to the hacker forum she disrupted, Kayla started regularly trolling people for kicks. She angered at the smallest hint of
doubt at her skills and was obsessed with proving herself. She took her aggression out on other hackers, “furfags” (people with a penchant
for bestiality), and online pedophiles. Each time she and other hackers would find their personal details, she’d aim to scare them with their
information, then post it online or threaten to send it to the police. Around 2008, someone invited Kayla to Partyvan, a sprawling network of
chat rooms created by a few people who wanted to unite other IRC networks that were linked to image boards like 4chan. The idea was to
better collaborate on raids and create a home for the online phenomenon that people were increasingly referring to as Anonymous.
Raids, like that on Habbo Hotel, were a step up from trolling because they involved multiple people working together to cause mischief.
Eventually, it was the raids that got Anonymous its first real airing in the mainstream press as a single entity—perhaps not surprisingly by a
Fox TV News affiliate in Los Angeles. The segment, aired in July 2007, was given the usual sensationalist treatment: whooshing sound
effects and flashes of white light. “They call themselves Anonymous they are hackers on steroids,” the anchor said without pausing, “treating
the web like a real-life video game.”
The camera cut to silhouetted hands typing on a keyboard. “Destroy. Die. Attack,” another disembodied voice intoned. “Threats from a
gang of computer hackers calling themselves Anonymous.” The segment featured an interview with a MySpace user named “David,” who
said tormentors from Anonymous had cracked seven of his passwords.
“They plastered his profile with gay sex pictures,” the narrator remarked. “His girlfriend left him…. They attack innocent people, like an
Internet hate machine.” The words “Internet hate machine” zoomed up onto the screen as the narrator added that Anonymous had issued
death threats and threatened to bomb sports stadiums, actual pranks that had indeed been carried out by visitors to /b/.