We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

spotlight.
Chapter 7
FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE
It was September 2010, and for a couple of years now the Anonymous phenomenon had vanished from news headlines. Raids were small,
petty assaults on other sites, mostly carried out by chans or /b/ itself. Very little was happening on IRC, either. The thousands who had piled
into #xenu had moved on, put off by the internal discord, their interest lost in the novelty.
On September 8, an article about an Indian software company called Aiplex started getting passed around online. Girish Kumar, Aiplex’s
CEO, had boasted to the press that his company was acting as a hit man for Bollywood, India’s booming film industry. Aiplex didn’t just sell
software. It was working on behalf of movie studios to attack websites that allowed people to download pirated copies of their films.
Recently, for instance, it had launched DDoS attacks against several torrent sites, including the most famous of them all, The Pirate Bay.
Founded in 2003, The Pirate Bay was the most popular and storied BitTorrent site on the net, a treasure trove from which anyone could
illegally download movies, songs, porn, and computer programs. Aiplex had used a botnet to flood The Pirate Bay with traffic, overload its
servers, and temporarily shut it down. Kumar had explained that when torrent sites didn’t respond to a notice from Aiplex, “we flood the
website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service.”
Tech bloggers and journalists already suspected that antipiracy groups were DDoSing torrent sites like The Pirate Bay, but Kumar’s
admission was the first proof. It was still a shocking admission; DDoS-ing was illegal in the United States, having sent Brian Mettenbrink to
jail for a year. Now the Indian company was openly boasting of using the same method.
Soon enough, users on /b/ started discussing the news. It turned out that lots of people wanted to hit back at Aiplex. A few started pasting
an everyone-get-in-here link to a channel on IRC for proper planning. This time, there weren’t thousands piling in like they had done with
#xenu. Fighting copyright wasn’t as sexy as hitting a shady religious group that suppressed a video of Tom Cruise. But piracy was popular
among /b/ users, and, soon enough, roughly 150 people had entered the new IRC channel, game for Anonymous to give Aiplex a taste of its
own medicine.
Coordinating an attack would not be easy. By now, IRC network hosts had become more aware of Anonymous and would quickly shut
down a chat room if they thought people were using it to discuss a DDoS attack. To deal with this, the Anons jumped from IRC network to
IRC network, pasting links to the new rooms on 4chan and Twitter each time they moved so others could follow. No one was appointed to
find the new locations; whenever the group had to move, someone would find a new network and make a channel. The channels were
always innocuously named so as not to attract attention, but the regular channel name for attacking Aiplex was called #savethepb,
abbreviating Pirate Bay.
After some planning, the group launched its first DDoS attack on Aiplex on September 17 at 9:00 p.m. eastern standard time. Just as they
had hoped, the software company’s website went dark—and remained so for twenty-four hours. Feeling confident, the Anons quickly
broadened their attack, posting digital flyers on /b/ so others could use LOIC against another organization trying to end piracy: the Recording
Industry Association of America, or RIAA. The tech blog TorrentFreak.com posted a news article headlined “4chan to DDoS RIAA Next—
Is This the Protest of the Future?” The group then hit another copyright organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
Two days later they began circulating a message to the media, saying that Anonymous was avenging The Pirate Bay by hitting copyright
associations and “their hired gun,” Aiplex. They called the attacks “Operation: Payback Is A Bitch” and claimed to have taken down Aiplex
thanks to a “SINGLE ANON” with a botnet.
“Anonymous is tired of corporate interests controlling the internet and silencing the people’s rights to spread information,” the letter said,
adding, “Rejoice /b/brothers.”
In unashamedly romanticizing pirated movies and music, they were also positioning Aiplex’s attacks on The Pirate Bay as “censorship,”
giving their fight-back broader appeal. For the first time in two years, it looked like Anonymous might be onto another major project after
Chanology, and the spark had been that all-important provocation in hacker culture: you DDoS me, I DDoS you.
It was around this time that Tflow, the quiet hacker who would later bring together Sabu, Topiary, and Kayla, read the TorrentFreak article
and jumped into his first Anonymous operation. It would later emerge that the person behind Tflow lived in London and was just sixteen
years old. He never talked about his age or background when he was online.
“I thought it was a good and unique cause,” he later remembered. “Of course, DDoS attacks got boring after that.” What Tflow meant was
that he was more interested in finding ways that Anons could disrupt antipiracy organizations other than knocking their sites offline. He
hopped into #savethepb to observe what other supporters were saying and was pleasantly surprised. A few people appeared to have as much
technical knowledge as he did. After Tflow approached a few privately and they met in a separate IRC channel, the smaller team started
looking for vulnerabilities in antipiracy groups and found one in the website CopyrightAlliance.org.
About a week after the DDoS attack on Aiplex, the hackers in Tflow’s group carried out the first SQL injection attack in their campaign,
possibly one of the first to be committed under the banner of Anonymous. They hacked into the CopyrightAlliance.org Web server and
replaced the site with the same message used on September 19, “Payback Is A Bitch.” Defacing a site was harder to do than carrying out a
DDoS attack—you had to get root access to a server—but it had a bigger impact. They then turned CopyrightAlliance.org into a repository
for pirated movies, games, and songs, including, naturally, “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, and Classic Sudoku. They also
stole 500 megabytes of e-mails from London copyright law firm ACS:Law and published them on the same defaced site.
Tflow and the others were all the while herding supporters from place to place. Between September and November 2010, he helped move
roughly three hundred regular chat participants between ten different IRC networks so that they could keep collaborating.