We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

nude photos. Four years later, an eighteen-year-old hacker got the password credentials for President Obama’s official Twitter account.
Another hacker got photos of Hannah Montana. The forum was a place where crackers could trade ever more ambitious bragging rights, a
place where a person could get in touch with spammers (also known as Internet marketers) and sell a stolen database or two.
YTCracker didn’t like Anonymous because he didn’t like the way innocent people got caught in the crossfire. It had happened to him. In
March of 2011, a few hackers on his forum, including one named Xyrix, attacked his site for no reason other than that he hosted some of
their enemies. To get his administrative access, they called AT&T and reported YTCracker’s phone stolen, got a new phone and SIM card,
and were able to grab his Gmail password. From that they were able to hack into the Digital Gangsters forum, then deface it with a message
that said it had been “hacked by Kayla, a 16-year-old girl.”
Here’s where Emick stumbled into a world of confusion. Kayla was described as a twenty-three-year-old on this site, but she had read an
Encyclopedia Dramatica article saying that back in 2008, “Xyrix posed as a woman using the name ‘Kayla’ on the Partyvan network.” Xyrix
was widely known to be a heavyset twenty-four-year-old man from New Jersey named Corey Barnhill. Emick thought, incorrectly, that this
meant Kayla was Barnhill.
Kayla had an explanation for why everyone thought she was Xyrix: back in 2008, she had hacked his main web account and pretended to
be him to get information out of a Partyvan admin; the admin then mistakenly thought that Xyrix and Kayla were the same person and added
her into Xyrix’s Encyclopedia Dramatica page. The “hacked by Kayla, a 16-year-old girl” deface on YTCracker’s site may well have been
Xyrix taking advantage of that misunderstanding to try to humiliate YTCracker.
Emick was going down the wrong path with Kayla, but she still felt she was onto something. She started spending more time on these
forums, piecing together nicknames, fake identities, and false information, being led down new trails. While many hackers varied their
nicknames, a lust for credibility compelled many more to stay with one name. In many cases, all Emick needed to do was plug a nickname
into Google, search for it against forums like DG and Reddit, and then talk to a few of that person’s friends on IRC. She used note-taking
software to cross-reference everything.
“You have to be anal retentive,” she later explained. Soon she had amassed gigabytes of data on her computer and had enough to put real
names, even addresses, to a few Anons.
Emick felt an urgency to turn her research into something that would better Barr’s faulty approach. Beating Barr at his own game became a
personal challenge. Realizing she would need help, she began talking to an online friend from her old Chanology days about forming an anti-
Anonymous tag team.
Jin Soo Byun was a twenty-six-year-old security penetration tester who had once been an air force cryptologist but had retired when he
was caught in an IED roadside bombing in Iraq. The accident left him with serious brain damage and memory loss, but he threw himself into
the 2008 Chanology protests and built up a reputation for social engineering under the nicknames Mudsplatter and Hubris. He and Emick
served as administrators on Laurelai’s website, and the pair developed a friendship via Skype, instant-message chats, and phone calls. Often
they would just gossip about the hacking scene, taking pleasure in trash-talking their enemies.
Emick told Byun about her plan. Anonymous had become an almost unstoppable mob. “Someone needs to stop them before something
bad happens,” she told him. He was game. For a few years, Emick and Byun had talked about starting a digital security company that used
Byun’s technology expertise and Emick’s investigative skills. Now they had something to work with, what Emick was calling a
“psychological operation.”
Byun reached out to friends in the cyber security industry, gathering about six people who were willing to help their research. Among
them was Aaron Barr.
“Right away after helping the [FBI] investigation I wanted to understand the group even more,” he later explained. “Especially the ones
that attacked us.”
They needed to act quickly. Anonymous was being riled up to attack Sony, and to make matters worse, HBGary had made them feel they
were unstoppable.
They decided to call their group Backtrace Security, a name that came straight out of the 4chan-meme machine. It referred to the Jessi
Slaughter incident, when /b/ users had viciously trolled a young girl who had been posting videos of herself on YouTube, leading her
mustachioed father to launch a tirade into her webcam—which she then uploaded. Choice quotes such as “I know who it’s coming from!
Because I backtraced it!” along with “Ya done goofed!” and the “cyber police” all became memes. Sarcastically using the word backtrace
was meant to infuriate Anonymous because it was reclaiming one of their inside jokes.
Emick got everyone connected to a spreadsheet that they could all edit. A chat bar ran alongside it for discussing their work in real time.
She provided a long list of nicknames from AnonOps IRC that they would dox. Everyone picked nicknames at random, then delved into
finding their true identities. Sometimes someone in the group would get a tip-off that would lead him to add a new name to the list. Barr
joined in the online discussions too, sharing general information about Anonymous that he had gleaned from his research. The most timeconsuming
task was sifting through the compiled data. Emick and the others downloaded reams of information, but picking through it took
days.
Once her kids were out the door and on the school bus, Emick was rooted to her desk, sometimes for the next eighteen hours or until her
concentration flagged. She skipped lunch and often got the kids to cook dinner. They ate a lot of pizza. Emick said her kids were supportive,
though she didn’t let them know what she was up to most of the time. She raised them to be self-reliant. Emick was the oldest of five kids,
and her father and stepmother had been alcoholics who largely left her to cook, do laundry, and pay household bills. Although her dad
sometimes cooked, her stepmom rarely left the couch.
Emick worked from a seven-foot-wide custom-built desk that was tucked in a corner of her divided living room. On it were her phone,
notebooks, files, lamps, a box of Christmas cards from the last holiday season, and two computers. One was a laptop that ran on Linux, the
open-sourced operating system, which she used for chatting on IRC. She needed two PCs for when she was pretending to be two people in
chat channels at the same time or tweeting on more than one Twitter account. Her main one was @FakeGreggHoush. When she snooped on
AnonOps and tried to weed out information, eagle-eyed operators noticed her nickname and attempted to identify her IP address. Each
computer worked off a proxy server that put her in two different time zones to prevent them from getting a location match.
Many names on Emick’s list only took about ten or twenty minutes to track down. Some Anons were reusing their nicknames on sites like