We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

“I’ll go away and hack it, come back with access and let people go mad,” she said. Kayla couldn’t help herself most of the time anyway. If
she was reading something online she would habitually start playing around with their parameters and login scripts. More often than not, she
would find something wrong with them.
Still, working for q gave Kayla a bigger excuse to go after the .gov and .mil targets, particularly those of third-world countries in Africa or
South America, which were easier to get access to than those in more developed countries. Every day was a search for new targets and a new
hack. Kayla never found anything as big as, say, the HBGary e-mail hoard for q, but she did, for instance, find vulnerabilities in the main
website for the United Nations. In April 2011, Kayla started putting together a list of United Nations “vulns.” This, for example:
http://www.un.org.al/subindex.php?faqe=details&id=57
was a United Nations server that was vulnerable to SQL injection, specifically subindex.php. And this page at the time:
http://www.un.org.al/subindex.php?faqe=details&id=57%27
would throw an SQL error, meaning Kayla or anyone else could inject SQL statements and suck out the database. The original URL didn’t
have %27 at the end, but Kayla’s simply adding that after testing the parameters of php/asp scripts helped her find the error messages.
Kayla eventually got access to hundreds of passwords for government contractors and lots of military e-mail addresses. The latter were
worthless, since the military uses a token system for e-mail that is built into a computer chip on an individual’s ID card, and it requires a PIN
and a certificate on the card before anyone is able to access anything.
It was boring and repetitive work, trawling through lists of e-mail addresses, looking for dumps from other hackers, and hunting for
anything government or military related. But Kayla was said to be happy doing it. Every week or so, she would meet on IRC with q and pass
over the collected info via encrypted e-mail, then await further instructions. If she asked what Julian Assange thought of what she was doing,
q would say he approved of what was going on.
It turned out that q was good at lying.
Almost a year after Kayla started volunteering for WikiLeaks, other hackers who had been working with q found out he was a rogue
operator who had recruited them without Assange’s knowledge. In late 2011, Assange asked q to leave the organization. Kayla was not the
only volunteer looking for information for what she thought was WikiLeaks. The rogue operator had also gotten other hackers to work with
him on false pretenses. And in addition, one source claims, q stole $60,000 from the WikiLeaks t-shirt shop and transferred the money into
his personal account. WikiLeaks never found out what q was doing with the vulnerabilities that Kayla and other hackers found, though it is
possible he sold them to others in the criminal underworld. It seemed, either way, like q did not really care about unearthing government
corruption, and Kayla, a master at hiding her true identity from even her closest online friends, had been duped.
None of this mattered come February of 2011 when Kayla began talking with Tflow, Topiary, and Sabu in the exclusive new chat room
that would bring them together for a landmark heist on Super Bowl Sunday: the attack on HBGary Federal. The bigger secret, which Kayla
didn’t know then, was that Sabu would not only get her deeper into a world of hacking that would become front-page news, but watch as her
details got passed on directly to the FBI.
Chapter 11
The Aftermath
It was February 8, 2011, two days after Super Bowl Sunday. Aaron Barr was grabbing shirts out of his closet, quickly folding them, and
placing them into the medium-size suitcase that rested on the bed in front of him. This was no mad rush, but Barr had to move. He had spent
fifteen years in the military, and he and his family were now expert travelers. They made their preparations quickly and with quiet efficiency.
His wife was packing a separate bag, the silence interrupted only by the occasional question about traveling arrangements. Just two hours
before, Barr had been back in his study catching up on the flood of news stories about the HBGary attack and the new, disastrous view the
media was taking of Barr’s proposals to Hunton & Williams against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald.
Learning about the Anonymous hack had been stressful for him. But the media’s feast on his controversial e-mails was having a definite
effect on his blood pressure. Barr longed to correct each story, but lawyers had told him to stay quiet for now. All he could do was read and
grit his teeth. Occasionally, curiosity would overcome his better judgment and he would dip into the AnonOps IRC rooms under a
pseudonym to see what the Anons were saying. He was still a laughingstock for the hundreds of participants hungry to see Barr humiliated in
new ways. There were calls for anyone who lived in Washington, D.C., to drive past Barr’s house and take pictures or to send him things in
the mail—he received a blind person’s walking cane and a truckful of empty boxes. He also got one pizza. A couple of people had randomly
shown up at his front door, and one had tried to take pictures of the inside of his house. Barr had been disturbed but had just sent them away,
figuring this was mostly harmless. Then, a couple of hours earlier, he had visited Reddit, a snarky forum site that had become increasingly
popular with people who liked 4chan but wanted more intelligent discussion. A user had posted the Forbes interview with Barr from the
preceding Monday, and amid the analysis and machismo in the 228 resulting comments, there were a few nasty suggestions about Barr’s
kids. It was most likely just talk, but Barr didn’t want to take any more chances. It took only one nutjob to pull a trigger, after all. Minutes
later, he had talked to his wife, and the two started packing.
That afternoon the family loaded everything into their car, the twins thinking they were about to embark on some exciting road trip. Barr’s
wife and kids drove south to stay with a friend for two weeks while Barr hopped on a plane to Sacramento. This was where HBGary Inc.
was headquartered and where Barr would get into the cleanup job and start to help the police with their investigation.