We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

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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 know the man’s real name and didn’t ask. He didn’t know if Anon8935 was sitting in the sweltering heat of a city or tucked away in a quiet suburb. The man said only that he’d been a street protester and now wanted to try something different, something with the Internet. Trouble was, Anon8935 didn’t know a thing about hacking. Sabu gave him some simple instructions, then said, “My brother. Are you ready?” “Yes,” the other replied. “You realize I’m going to use your computer to hack pm.gov.tn?” “OK,” the main replied. “Tell me what to do.” Sabu sent over some brief instructions for downloading and installing a program that would let Sabu take control of the man’s computer. Soon he was operating on an antiquated version of Windows and an achingly slow Internet connection. “See me?” Sabu asked, moving the mouse cursor. “OK!” the man typed back. Sabu set to work while the Tunisian man sat and watched. Sabu opened up the command prompt and began typing programming code that his new friend had never seen before, a lengthening column of white text against a black background representing the back roads of the Web. About forty minutes later, Sabu brought up the official website of Tunisia’s president. Sabu imagined the man’s eyes growing wider at this point. Within minutes, the president’s official website was gone, replaced by a simple white page with black lettering. At the top, in large Times New Roman font, it read “Payback is a bitch, isn’t it?” Underneath was the giant black silhouette of a pirate ship and the name Operation Payback. The word operation reinforced the idea that this wasn’t just a protest or anarchy; it was a mission. In the meantime, Tflow had told Topiary that a hack on Tunisia was under way, and he asked if he could create an official deface statement. Topiary wrote it up and passed the statement to Tflow, who sent it to Sabu, who used it to replace the official site of Tunisian prime minister Ghannouchi. “Greetings from Anonymous,” the home page of pm.gov.tn now read. “We have been watching your treatment of your own citizens, and we are both greatly saddened and enraged by your behavior.” It carried on dramatically before ending with the tagline: “We are Anonymous, We are legion…Expect us.” Sabu stared at the new page and then sat back and smiled. “You don’t know the feeling of using this guy’s Internet to hack the president’s website,” he later remembered. “It was fucking amazing.” The Tunisian government had set up a firewall to stop foreign hackers from attacking its servers; it had never expected attackers to come from within its own borders. “Thanks, brother,” Sabu said. “Make sure to delete everything you downloaded for this and reset your connection.” After a few minutes, the man went offline, and some days later, Sabu hung a Tunisian flag in his house. Sabu then heard that the man had been arrested. While he felt bad for his volunteer, Sabu did not feel guilty. A higher cause had been served. “Operation Tunisia,” Sabu later recalled, “was the beginning of a serious technical advancement for Anonymous.” On January 14, Tunisian president Ben Ali stepped down. It was a landmark moment, following a month of demonstrations by thousands of Tunisians over unemployment and Ali’s overarching power and culminating in a new form of online protest, an alliance of people on the other side of the world working with local citizens. Ali fled Tunisia and took a plane to Saudi Arabia, and Sabu ended his weeks-long attack on Tunisian government servers. By February, Ghannouchi would resign too, and over the coming months, Internet censorship in the country would fall dramatically. In the meantime, Sabu, the hackers in #InternetFeds, and the Anons on AnonOps turned their attention to other countries in the Middle East. Sabu worked with hackers to take government websites in Algeria offline, then accessed government e-mails in Zimbabwe, seeking evidence of corruption. Sabu and Kayla continued doing the rooting; Tflow did the coordinating; and Topiary wrote the deface messages. Anonymous’s new Middle East campaign was moving at light speed, with teams of volunteers hitting a different Arab website almost every day. They were spurred on by the vulnerabilities they discovered, the newfound camaraderie—and the resulting media attention. Kayla in particular was on a roll, but not just because she wanted to support the revolution. The hacker had struck a secret deal with someone who claimed to be with WikiLeaks. Chapter 10 Meeting the Ninja As Anonymous turned its attention to the Middle East in early January of 2011, Topiary continued organizing and writing deface messages in #propaganda and talking to journalists in #reporter. #Command wasn’t much to look at anymore—too many operators and too much squabbling. There were about twenty Anons in each publicity channel, most of them talented writers who had written Anonymous press releases in the past. Once in a while, Topiary talked to Tflow, who would drop into #propaganda to pick up a deface message; soon Topiary would see his text on an official government website for Zimbabwe. With the help of a French Anon, a French version was also posted. Topiary liked explaining Anonymous to reporters and writing deface messages that shocked a website’s visitors and owners. He also liked learning how to deal with the press, how to get them interested in a story by offering them exclusive information. He wondered if the writers and spokespeople like himself were among the more influential members of Anonymous in the world outside the collective. Soon people started inviting him into more channels that no one else talked about publicly. On January 2, he got an important tap on the shoulder, this time from Tflow. Sabu, via a local volunteer, had been preparing to take control of the prime minister’s website, and he needed a good deface message, quickly. “The government of Tunisia’s main sites are going to be hacked,” Tflow told Topiary. “Can you design the deface message?” Topiary felt
“The government of Tunisia’s main sites are going to be hacked,” Tflow told Topiary. “Can you design the deface message?” Topiary felt an instant buzz. This was the first time anyone had trusted him with the knowledge that a hack was about to happen. Eager to help, he and Tflow discussed the timing of what they referred to as the deface, and then Topiary wrote his usual ominous message to the repressive Tunisian government. As the hack was happening and the deface message being uploaded, Topiary and Tflow went into the main AnonOps chat rooms and gave a running commentary of the attack, to inspire the troops a little. When it was all over, Tflow surprised Topiary again by inviting him into #InternetFeds. He was effectively trusting Topiary to collaborate and share ideas with some of the most highly skilled hackers working with Anonymous. Topiary had been a stranger to these people, but gradually he was getting their attention. Over the next month, much of Sabu’s hacking and Topiary’s writing would be at the forefront of Anonymous cyber attacks on the governments of Libya, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Jordan, and Bahrain. Anonymous was not only defacing sites but releasing government e-mail addresses and passwords. Attacks also continued in other parts of the world in the name of Anonymous; two Irish hackers defaced the website of Ireland’s main opposition party, Fine Gael. It was a flurry of revolutionary activity that made Anonymous suddenly look less like a bunch of bored pranksters and more like real activists. Then on February 5, Tflow sent Topiary another private message on AnonOps IRC, this time inviting him into an even more secret IRC channel that would include just a handful of core people from #InternetFeds. When Topiary entered the exclusive chat room, he forgot he had (as a joke) set a programming script to run on his IRC client that would kick anyone out of the room who didn’t use at least 80 percent capital letters. His first interaction with Sabu involved kicking him out of the chat room. Embarrassed, Topiary apologized and quickly turned off the script. But Sabu took it well, and the group of five—Topiary, Sabu, Kayla, Tflow, and Q—quickly got to talking. The topic was HBGary and Aaron Barr’s article in the Financial Times. Topiary couldn’t get his head around who or what Kayla was. He vaguely remembered seeing the name Kayla on his old MSN chat list, a 2008 4chan flood, and articles about her on Encyclopedia Dramatica. In between lots of smiley faces and lols, she talked about hacking like it was an addiction. She couldn’t look at a website without checking to see if there were holes in the source code that she could exploit, perhaps allowing her to steal a database or two. She was a conundrum: She seemed to be the chattiest, most happy-go-lucky person in the group, but she was also paranoid and apparently dangerous. She had developed a cast-iron protection for her real identity, and the bold admission that she was sixteen, along with the overwhelming number of emoticons and hearts (
Page 2 and 3: Begin Reading Table of Contents Cop
Page 4 and 5: his HBGary Federal account, possibl
Page 6 and 7: culture and key figures within it.
Page 8 and 9: dreadful fascination at his phone a
Page 10 and 11: Aaron Barr would never have come fa
Page 12 and 13: “nigger,” “faggot,” or just
Page 14 and 15: owns my ass.” With his other hand
Page 16 and 17: In 2008 he helped instigate Operati
Page 18 and 19: death threats and threatened to bom
Page 20 and 21: another poster described “Phase 2
Page 22 and 23: though, they were usurped by what w
Page 24 and 25: We are Legion We do not forgive We
Page 26 and 27: day in federal prison. In the meant
Page 28 and 29: Since childhood, Bailey had harbore
Page 30 and 31: oughly three hundred regular chat p
Page 32 and 33: 1. Get the latest LOIC from github.
Page 34 and 35: Asperger syndrome, rarely left his
Page 36 and 37: “It’s a troll,” another organ
Page 38 and 39: had joined mentoring program iMento
Page 42 and 43: time. Kayla actually had several IR
Page 44 and 45: was headquartered and where Barr wo
Page 46 and 47: “So are we going to focus on Anon
Page 48 and 49: Starting in early January, many sup
Page 50 and 51: “Well in my lifetime I’ve perfo
Page 52 and 53: uh, actual intelligence.” There w
Page 54 and 55: definitely unimpressed—the claims
Page 56 and 57: nude photos. Four years later, an e
Page 58 and 59: “Is this a new trend :D to see wh
Page 60 and 61: network collapsed, they would move
Page 62 and 63: large notice board with paperwork a
Page 64 and 65: April 2011, while he and Sabu were
Page 66 and 67: since they had a wider array of ski
Page 68 and 69: will get in trouble and might be gr
Page 70 and 71: passwords for almost every journali
Page 72 and 73: or online for most of the day and s
Page 74 and 75: 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
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opposite of Kayla. And yet there wa
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one of the LulzSec accounts in resp
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on the network. He decided to try t
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morning of their meeting, William
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techniques like the Cain and Abel p
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hackers in private IRC rooms. It wa
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the open at the same time: the susp
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Kayla’s story had become more imp
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Stephane Fitch, who also introduced
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writes a spoof news article about t
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following twenty names in the ranki
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to websites that showed the steps o
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Minions.” Another helpful source
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“extreme version of Calvinism”
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2011, however, we held our first re
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that were first leaked online by Pa
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on the CIA. Details about Julian As
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Descriptions of Ryan Mark Ackroyd w
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Parmy Olson is the London bureau ch
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We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

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