We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

though, they were usurped by what would become the two most popular weapons in the Anonymous arsenal: botnets and the Low-Orbit Ion
Cannon (LOIC).
Botnets would not be used significantly by Anonymous for a few more years, but they were easily the more powerful of two key weapons.
These were large networks of “zombie” computers usually controlled by a single person who gave them commands from a private IRC
channel. It’s rumored that botnets were used just once or twice during the first Anonymous attacks on Chanology, though few details are
known. Often botnets are made up of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand computers around the world. The biggest botnets,
ones that have the power to take out the servers of small governments, have upward of a million computers. The computers belong to average
people like you and me, oblivious to what is going on—often we’ll have joined a botnet by accidentally downloading infected software or
visiting a compromised website. Perhaps someone sent us a spam e-mail with a link promising free photo prints or a cash prize, or we clicked
on an interesting video that disguised malicious code.
Nothing appears to be amiss after such software downloads. It installs itself quickly and quietly and for the most part remains dormant.
When the botnet controller issues commands to a network of “bots,” a signal is sent to the infected computer, and the small program that was
downloaded starts up in the background without the owner’s realizing it. (Who knows—your computer could be taking part in a DDoS
attack right now.) The network of thousands of computers will act together, as if they were one single computer. Typically, botnets will use
their bots to send spam, find security vulnerabilities in other websites, or launch a DDoS attack on a corporate website while the controller
demands a ransom to stop. In underground hacker culture, larger botnets translate to greater street cred for the controllers, or botmasters.
It’s unclear how many computers in the world have been assimilated into botnets, but the number is at least in the tens of millions, with the
greatest number of bot-infested computers in the United States and China. In 2009 the Shadowserver Foundation reported that there were
thirty-five hundred identified botnets in the world, more than double the number in 2007. In March 2010 Spanish police arrested three men
behind a botnet called Mariposa, Spanish for “butterfly.” Discovered by white-hat hackers (cyber security specialists) and law enforcement
agents in 2008, the monster botnet was made up of as many as twelve million zombie computers and had been used to launch DDoS attacks,
send out e-mail spam, and steal personal details. The ringleaders made money on the side by renting it out.
Renting a botnet was far less risky than making one yourself, and with the right skill set and contacts, they were surprisingly easy to come
by. A 2010 study by Web infrastructure company VeriSign showed the average rate for renting a botnet from an underground marketplace
was $67 for twenty-four hours and just $9 for one hour. Renting a botnet that could take out the servers of a small government might cost
around $200 an hour. Botnets used by Anonymous in both the Chanology attacks of 2008 and Op Payback in 2010–11 were both rented and
self-created, and sources say there was also a range of botnet sizes. But it was the super botnets, controlled by a small handful of people, that
could do the most damage.
The second weapon in the Anonymous arsenal was the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, whose acronym is pronounced “lo-ick.” In terms of
power, it was piddling against a botnet—like the difference between a long-range missile and a handgun—but the software was free and easy
for anyone with a computer to access. From the start of Chanology onward, LOIC started replacing Gigaloader in popularity. The origins of
the software program are a little unclear, but it is widely thought to have first been developed by a programmer nicknamed Praetox, who was
eighteen at the time, lived in Oslo, Norway, and enjoyed programming and “running in the woods,” according to his website.
Praetox made all sorts of things on his computer, including cheats for the online role-playing game Tibia and a program that would make
windows on a computer desktop look transparent. He was also versed in chan culture and used the cartoon image of a “Pool’s closed” sign
for his YouTube account. The name LOIC itself comes from a weapon in the Command & Conquer video game series, and of all his
creations it would be Praetox’s legacy.
Praetox appears to have originally created LOIC as an open source project, which meant anyone could improve it. Eventually, a
programmer nicknamed NewEraCracker made some tweaks that allowed LOIC to send out useless requests or “packets” to a server, making
it what it is today. At the time, packets were part of everything one did on the Internet. Visiting a web page involved receiving a series of
packets, as did sending an e-mail, with a typical packet containing 1–1,500 bytes. They can be compared to addressed envelopes in the postal
service. “Packet sniffing” meant trying to figure out what was inside a piece of mail by looking at what was on the envelope. The data inside
a file could be encrypted, but the packet itself would always identify the sender and receiver.
A DDoS attack was, in one way, like overwhelming someone with thousands of pieces of junk mail that they had no choice but to open.
One defense was to “filter the packets,” which would be like asking a doorman to not allow any mail from a certain sender. But DDoS
protection costs money, and it was difficult to filter the junk packets from LOIC, since they were coming from many different users.
Ultimately, if enough people used the program and “aimed” it at the same site at the same time, they could overload it with enough junk
traffic to take it offline. The effect was similar to a botnet’s, except instead of having infected computers, the participants were voluntarily
joining the network. A key difference was effectiveness. The effect of LOIC was far more unpredictable than that of traditional botnets, since
popularity and human error came into play. You might need four thousand people to take the website of a major corporation down, in the
same way you’d need four thousand people wielding handguns to destroy a small building. You’d need just a few hundred people to take
down a tiny homemade website belonging to an individual. The upside was that downloading LOIC was free and easy—you could get it
from a torrent site or 4chan’s /rs/ board.
One of the hundreds of people who downloaded LOIC and took part in some of the first impromptu Scientology attacks was a college
student named Brian Mettenbrink. An Iowa State University student with a mop of brown hair and a beard, Mettenbrink, eighteen, was
sitting in front of his desktop computer in a dorm room, browsing through his favorite website, 7chan, when he first saw posts about a
Scientology raid in January 2008. He did not care about Scientology, but he was interested in exploring the world of IT security and reasoned
that taking part in an attack like this was a good way to learn about the other side of the industry. Besides, with so many other people
contributing to the attack, he wouldn’t get caught.
Mettenbrink, who had been regularly visiting 4chan since he was fifteen, went to the site’s /rs/ board and downloaded LOIC. The
download took a few seconds, and it included a “readme” file to explain how to use it. The program gave the impression that it was
connecting users to an army of rebel fighters. When Mettenbrink first opened LOIC, the main window that popped up had a Star Wars–
themed design: dark and light green text boxes, and a Photoshopped mock-up of the Anti-Orbital Ion Cannon used in Star Wars: The Clone
Wars, blasting a thick green laser beam toward a planet.