We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

disruptive, hacking into auto companies and ordering car engines and disturbing his neighbors by playing loud music, often until 4:00 a.m. in
the home where his grandmother no longer lived. Monsegur was unemployed and drifting.
Then in early December, out of nowhere, Anonymous burst onto the scene with WikiLeaks, offering a cause that Monsegur could be
passionate about. He watched the first attack on PayPal unfold and saw echoes of his work with Hackweiser and his protest attack for the
island of Vieques, but on a much grander scale. He would later say that Anonymous was the movement he had been waiting for all those
years “underground.”
On December 8, when AnonOps had its highest surge of visitors for the initial big attack on PayPal, Monsegur signed into the public chat
room, using the nickname Sabu for the first time in almost a decade. It was chaos on AnonOps IRC, with hundreds of trolls and script kiddies
(wannabe hackers) all talking over one another.
“We need the name of the wired employee who just spoke on cnn,” he said, referring to Wired magazine’s New York City bureau chief,
John Abell. “john swell? john awell? pm me the name please.!!!” As Sabu, he repeated the request three times. Eventually he zeroed in on
Tflow, who was dropping advanced programming terms. After Sabu and Tflow talked via private messages, neither of them revealing his
true location or any other identifying information, Tflow showed Sabu into the secret channel for hackers, #InternetFeds.
#InternetFeds was secure and quiet. In the open AnonOps chat rooms, hundreds clamored for large, impossible targets like Microsoft and
Facebook. There was little point trying to reason with the horde and explain why those targets wouldn’t work, that you needed to find a
server vulnerability first. It was like trying to explain the history of baseball to a noisy stadium full of people itching to see a home run. It had
been the same in Chanology, when the #xenu channel was backed by the quiet planning in #marblecake. Discord grew in #operationpayback
over who should feel the wrath of Anonymous next; the WikiLeaks controversy was receding from the headlines, and the hackers had grown
bored with trying to attack Assange’s critics. Sabu, Kayla, and the others in #InternetFeds increasingly talked about focusing their efforts on
another growing news story: revolution in the Middle East.
Sabu was already interested in the region, having attended a protest march or two for Palestine when he was younger. Now he and the
others were seeing articles about demonstrations in Tunisia that had been sparked by documents that WikiLeaks had released. Tunisia’s
government was known for aggressively censoring its citizens’ use of the Internet. Websites that were critical of the government were
hacked, their contents deleted and their servers shut down. Locals who visited prodemocracy e-newsletters and blogs would often be met
with error messages.
In early January of 2011, the government censorship appeared to get worse. Al Jazeera reported that the Tunisian government had started
hijacking its citizens’ Facebook logins and password details in a process known as phishing. Normally this was a tactic of cyber criminals;
here, a government was using it to spy on what its citizens were saying on social networks and mail services like Gmail and Yahoo. If
officials sniffed dissenters, they sometimes arrested them. Locals needed to keep changing their Facebook passwords to keep the government
out. At a time when the country of more than ten million people was on the edge of a political revolution, protesters and regular citizens alike
were struggling to avoid government spies.
The hackers in #InternetFeds came up with an idea, partly thanks to Tflow. The young programmer wrote a web script that Tunisians
could install on their web browsers and that would allow them to avoid the government’s prying eyes. The script was about the length of two
sides of paper, and Tflow tested it with another Anon in Tunisia, nicknamed Yaz, then pasted it onto a website called userscripts.org. He and
a few others then advertised the link in the #OpTunisia chat room on AnonOps, on Twitter, and in digital flyers. It got picked up by a few
news outlets. The hacktivist Q was one of the #InternetFeds members and also one of the dozen channel operators in the #OpTunisia
channel. He began talking with Tunisians on AnonOps—the ones who were web-savvy enough to access it via proxy servers—and
encouraged them to spread news of the script through their social networks.
“OpTunisia fascinated me,” Q later said in an interview. “Because we actually did make an impact by pointing Western media to the things
happening there.” Within a few days, news of the script had been picked up by technology news site ArsTechnica and it had been
downloaded more than three thousand times by Tunisian Internet users.
Sabu was impressed, but he wanted to make a different kind of impact—a louder one. Thinking back to how he had defaced the Puerto
Rican government websites, he decided he would support the Tunisian revolution by embarrassing its government. It helped that Arab
government websites were relatively easy to hack and deface.
Sabu and a few others from #InternetFeds discovered there were just two name servers hosting Tunisia’s government websites. This was
unusual—most governments and large companies with Web presences ran on several name servers, so a hacker taking down a few usually
didn’t do much damage. In Tunisia’s case, however, shutting down just two name servers would take the government completely offline.
“It was a very vulnerable set-up,” one hacker that was in #InternetFeds recalled. “It was easy to shut them off.”
To take the Tunisian servers offline, Sabu did not use a botnet. Instead, he later claimed, he hijacked servers from a web-hosting company
in London that allowed him to throw ten gigabytes worth of data per second at the Tunisian servers. These were broadcast servers, which
could amplify many times the amount of data spam of a basic server; it was like using a magnifying glass to enhance the sun’s rays and
destroy a group of ants. Sabu single-handedly kept the Tunisian servers down for five hours. Soon, though, authorities on the other side were
filtering his spoofed packets, like the owner of a mansion telling his butler not to bring in mail from a particular person. The traffic he was
sending was losing its effect. Undeterred, Sabu called an old friend for help, someone he knew from his days of dabbling in cyber crime.
While Sabu hit the first name server, the other took down the second.
Tunisia was where Sabu really got involved in Anonymous for the first time. He not only took down the government’s online presence; he
and a few others also trudged through dozens of government employee e-mails.
But the government fought back again. It blocked all Internet requests from outside Tunisia, shutting itself off from foreign Internet users
like Sabu. Sabu wanted to deface the site of Tunisian prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, but he would have to do that from inside the
country, and he wasn’t about to get on a plane. So on January 2, he signed into the #OpTunisia chat room with its dozen channel operators
and several hundred other Anons from around the world, including Tunisia. There was talk of using proxies and potential DDoS attacks;
questions about what was going on. Then Sabu hit the caps lock key and made his grand entrance.
“IF YOU ARE IN TUNISIA AND ARE WILLING TO BE MY PROXY INTO YOUR INTERNET PLEASE MSG ME.” The room
went almost silent. After a few minutes, Sabu got a private reply from someone with an automated username like Anon8935—if you didn’t
choose a unique nickname on AnonOps, the network would give you one similar to this—a man who claimed to be in Tunisia. Sabu didn’t