We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

since they had a wider array of skills, he claimed to have learned three times as much about programming and the Internet itself from
Anonymous than from darker hacking circles.
Pwnsauce was studying biology but longed to get out of Ireland. When he wasn’t studying or dealing with what he would only describe as
“family issues,” he, like Kayla, was in front of his computer, poking around the back ends of websites in what felt like a lifelong exploration
of the Web’s hidden vulnerabilities.
“He’s a perfect blend of technical skill and imagination,” Topiary later said of Pwnsauce. The two of them once had a lengthy discussion
about the best way to disrupt an airport’s security system, which moved them to remotely jack into a McDonald’s menu screen and import
green hacker text to confuse its attendants. “We were in hysterics,” Topiary remembered. “I really want to have a pint with this suave Irish
gentleman.”
One of Pwnsauce’s friends in the hacking scene was a fellow Irish hacker named Palladium; the two had hacked into the Irish opposition
party Fine Gael and called out Anonymous as being responsible back in February. Palladium had come in when the team had found a
vulnerability but needed help carefully and secretly exploiting it to take internal information.
In mid-April, Tflow had found a vulnerability in the servers of media powerhouse Fox, but he hadn’t done anything with it. He showed it
to Palladium, who was able to get a shell on it and break in. The two decided to collaborate on breaking into Fox. One of them eventually
found a sales database that held the personal information of Fox employees and journalists and seventy-three thousand e-mail addresses and
passwords for people who wanted to receive updates on auditions for the network’s forthcoming X Factor, a talent show on American
television. This was a model for how the group would later operate—keeping strategic decisions to the core six but working with a second
tier of trusted supporters to help them carry out attacks.
After breaching the Fox servers on April 19, the team members stayed there for days leeching all sorts of data, from user logins to the
passwords of radio station announcers. The team hadn’t set out to attack Fox, but its vulnerability stood out among all others because it was a
right-wing media force that most people in the Anonymous community hated. They hoped to find something funny in the trove of personal
information.
It took a week for Fox’s IT administrators to notice the breach, but by then the team had reams of data to sift through; it had been handed
over by Tflow, who had received it from Palladium. Topiary told both of them that he would go through a list of about three hundred and
fifty Fox staff members and test their names and passwords out on social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. It would be a slow,
methodical process, but hopefully he would find the misfortunate few who had reused the same passwords (as Aaron Barr had done) so he
could then hack their accounts and create another shitstorm.
Kayla’s scanning script had brought in a hefty list of vulnerabilities, and Topiary, who had had only a basic knowledge of hacking five
months before, also found the transaction logs of 3,100 ATMs in the United Kingdom. With normal hacker groups, none of this information
would have ever seen the light of day. It would have been stored for the hackers’ own personal collections or sold to spammers. But Topiary,
Sabu, and Kayla were coming from the world of Anonymous, where you didn’t hack just for data but to make some sort of social or political
point. Their twist would be, for now at least, that there was no significance to the release all. They would publish it for shits and giggles, for
lulz. It was a badge for Anonymous as much as for their small, increasingly tight-knit gang, and it meant they had a wider array of potential
targets to hack into and leak. First things first: the team needed a name.
That task fell to Topiary and Tflow, who decided it was paramount that the name included the word lulz. They toyed with the combination
of several names until they got to Lulz Leaks. It seemed to fit with their modus operandi, so Topiary created a Twitter account for the name
on May 3 and put out a single first tweet: “There is much to do—prepare yourselves.” A little while later, he needed to do a second tweet, but
he couldn’t sign into the account—he had forgotten the password.
The two went back to the drawing board. Lulz4ULeaks and Lulz Cannon were a mouthful, and the Lulz Boat, which they liked, was
already taken on Twitter. Then they thought about a name that would be a twist on Backtrace Security: Lulz Security. Topiary checked and
@LulzSec was free as a Twitter account. He set up a new account, this time making sure he had a record of the password, then wrote a bio
that read simply “LulzSecurity® the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense.”
They needed a picture, so Topiary looked through a folder of two thousand images called reaction faces. Anyone who used 4chan had a
folder like this to illustrate responses on a thread. He picked the drawing of a mustached man wearing a monocle and a top hat and holding a
glass of red wine. Topiary had no idea where it had come from, never considering that, given Topiary’s lazy eye, the man with a single lens
might be representing him.
It was time to give Anonymous a peek at what they were working on. When the names Topiary, Kayla, and Sabu suddenly appeared in a
key AnonOps chat room for the first time in more than two months, there was an almost visible buzz.
“You know shit is going down when the HBGary hackers are here,” someone said.
“Is that THE Sabu/Topiary/Kayla?” another asked.
Hearing that Anonymous supporters were at that time keen to attack the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Topiary and Kayla started looking
for vulnerabilities in the site right then, racing to see who could find the most. Topiary was quickly trounced. The two then started pasting the
page addresses for each of the security holes in the chamber’s site into the chat room. The chat room participants cheered and thanked them.
Soon word got out that the core HBGary trio were up to something big.
LulzSec, as hackers, were in very new territory. Stealing data was one thing, but announcing it through Twitter so the press could report on it
was odd. Topiary volunteered to the others to write a short statement to accompany the Fox and X Factor releases, which would otherwise
have been just long lists of data. Everyone agreed. It was clear that Topiary’s role would always be that of mouthpiece for the group. Nobody
really thought about who should man the LulzSec Twitter feed—it was just obvious that Topiary would do it. He published the statement via
the application Pastebin.
“Hello, good day, and how are you?” it started. “Splendid! We’re LulzSec, a small team of lulzy individuals who feel the drabness of the
cyber community is a burden on what matters: Fun.” This was a world away from the grave admonishments he’d written for Anonymous
press releases, the ones that had scolded PayPal for “censoring WikiLeaks” or that had warringly told HBGary “you don’t mess with
Anonymous.” If Anonymous had been the six o’clock news, LulzSec was The Daily Show, publishing similar content through a similar
process, but spun primarily to entertain, not to inform or encourage. They were free agents.