We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

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will get in trouble and might be grounded.” He released another document of ATM information for British cashpoints, none of it particularly harmful but a demonstration that they could get stuff. He linked the release to a YouTube video of the Love Boat theme song and pasted his own lyrics that ended, “Yes LULZ! Welcome aboard: it’s LULZ!” After a few days, most of @LulzSec’s two hundred and fifty Twitter followers were from the Anonymous community. People had heard something was going on and wanted to keep track. Very few people, outside of a few regulars on the Anonymous IRC channels, had any idea that these were the same hackers who had hit HBGary, the same ones who had suffered from Laurelai’s reckless #HQ log leak. Then Topiary noticed the LulzSec Twitter feed had a new follower: Aaron Barr. He couldn’t help but be thrilled at this and immediately started badgering him on Twitter. “We have the legendary AaronBarr following us…we hear he had a great time with #Anonymous, so great in fact that he quit his job. #ouch. We better watch out now,” he added. “AaronBarr is going to check our Tweet times with every single Facebook account login.” Then: “We’re following 0 people. if we follow one person, does that mean the e-detectives will pounce on them? Should we follow AaronBarr?.…Okay, we’re now following AaronBarr—he is our leader. He stole those Fox databases, he compromised over 3,000 ATM machines. Wait…shit.” Topiary thought for a moment about what all this attention on Barr would look like: anyone who knew about the HBGary attack would know the same hackers were now LulzSec. He threw caution to the wind and preemptively put it all out there: “Hey e-detectives: we’ve taken a lot of interest in Mr. Barr, therefore we must be the HBGary hackers. Right? Of course.” The team spent the next few weeks working through data they already had to plan their next stunt. Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla now had a small clutch of potential leads to work with. In the background was always Infragard, for which they could leak the details of about three hundred usernames and deface the home page. In the meantime, Topiary’s relationship with Kayla was shifting; he was going from being her friend to being her student. Knowing that he was getting into serious activity with LulzSec, he asked her about her setup for staying so incognito. Kayla taught Topiary how to run a virtual machine, then suggested he run Linux as a virtual operating system and a chat client called X-chat through that virtual machine, which he did. He also began to store his operating systems on a microSD card inside his encrypted MP3 player: a 32 GB SanDisk microSD, inside an 8 GB SanDisk MP3, inside an encrypted volume. Opening it now required a password and several key files, which were five MP3 songs out of thousands on his player. He had learned this entire setup from Kayla. Despite many hours of conversations, he was still mystified by Kayla. She would sign off at around four or five a.m. U.K. time most nights, suggesting that was when she was going to bed. She had told Topiary she was not in the United States or the U.K. But in conversation she often made references to things like Lemsip, a cold and flu medicine found in British stores, and beans on toast, a very British snack favored by debt-ridden students. On another occasion, when Kayla had agreed to meet online for an interview on U.K. time, she missed it, and then apologized that she had “got the time zones mixed up.” In May, Kayla also created a Twitter account, under the name @lolspoon, and it served as another way to confuse people about her true whereabouts. At 2:00 p.m. U.K. time, she would tweet, perhaps tongue in cheek, “Just woke up, early morning XD.” Topiary had seen screenshots of her desktop, which featured a clock saying 8.41, GMT -8 hours. She had claimed it was a virtual install, which meant the clock wasn’t set up properly. Topiary’s virtual OS was also set to GMT -8 hours. Kayla’s desktop had been very girlie. She had colorful stars as one background for her host operating system; rainbows for her virtual OS; and an anime girl as another one for a terminal window. It may have been too girlie to be girlie—but then Topiary’s desktop was arguably too manly: it featured one collage of comics about sharks and another of a large Slenderman character—a mythical creature spawned on an image board a few years prior—in a black suit and red tie. The online world has plenty of elaborate liars. Topiary recalled a girl on an old IRC network who fooled everyone online into thinking she was skinny by providing fake photos and acting defensively when talk turned to eating disorders. Once, she told a group of people in an IRC channel that she was going out to get a tattoo. Three hours later she came back online and uploaded a photo of a skinny human back completely covered with tattooed wings. “This is it,” she said. Topiary was immediately suspicious. He uploaded it to a website called tineye.com and did a reverse-image search to see where else the image had appeared on the Web. The tattoo was already all over the Web, so it wasn’t real. Eventually it led him to a video site and an account that included another image avatar (a painting) that the girl had used on her Skype account. One of its videos featured an obese girl playing the ukulele. The voice and alias details matched up. Topiary had laughed a little but didn’t reveal the details. He didn’t want to destroy her online life. Though he knew it could make his arrest more likely, Topiary started thinking about bringing his nickname back onto the public Web by using it on Twitter and on AnonOps IRC. But he needed some convincing, in the same way Sabu had needed convincing to get the team back together. “Why have you kept ‘Kayla’ after all this time?” Topiary asked her. “No one has ever doxxed me,” she replied. “It makes sense to just keep it.” People were always going to try to dox the nickname Topiary, she added. “But if your dox aren’t known you should just be Topiary and say ‘fuck you’ to all the haters.” Kayla’s mantra was to do all you could to be technically secure, then go out there and dismiss anyone who doubted you. “Kayla’s words had really sunk in that day,” Topiary later said. “I loved her simplistic yet compelling argument: nobody knew who she was, so why should she feel pressured into changing her name? It was a sassy kick in the teeth to the doxers. A kind of ‘Yes, I’m still here, bitches, what of it?’ I was inspired.” For the past two months, Topiary had been constantly changing nicknames to things like Slevin and Mainframe and trying not to say anything that would make people think he was the original Topiary. He was tired of the stress; maybe it would be nice for his online name to
anything that would make people think he was the original Topiary. He was tired of the stress; maybe it would be nice for his online name to get some of the credit for what was about to go down, and he didn’t like people thinking that Topiary had been arrested and had turned snitch. So he opened up his old personal Twitter account, called @atopiary, and posted a single tweet. People in the #anonleaks chat room on AnonOps IRC went into a frenzy. Some suggested that the person behind the account was a spy. It was classic Anonymous. Topiary knew the rumors would die down soon enough. They always did. In mid-May, the PBS news program Frontline showed a documentary about WikiLeaks that Sabu didn’t like one bit. It painted Julian Assange in a bad light. When he talked about it to the group, everyone else agreed. By chance, Kayla had found a vulnerability in one of PBS’s websites a few weeks earlier with her auto-scanning bot. Now Sabu asked the team if they agreed to make PBS their next big target. Never mind that it was America’s public broadcasting service and home to Sesame Street. There was no question—everyone was up for it. As usual, Sabu entered the PBS network through a security hole Kayla had found, and then he started removing user data—a database of thirty-eight staffers here, hundreds of pressroom users there. Sometimes it was hard to know what was being taken. It didn’t matter. They’d publish it anyway. The team used a tool called Havij to more quickly download the databases for easy viewing. While Sabu and Kayla did the grunt work of hacking, Topiary and AVunit worked on some dramatic calling cards, something that would make Anonymous laugh. The group worked through the night, adding several new pages to the PBS website, starting with www.pbs.org/lulz/, which went to a page with a giant picture of Nyan Cat. This was a cartoon image of a cat flying through space and pooping a rainbow, one of the most famous Internet memes of all time. They made another page, www.pbs.org/ShadowDXS/, featuring the photo of a fat man eating an enormous one-foot-tall hamburger with the caption “LOL HI I EAT CHILDRENS.” This was a shout-out to another Anon nicknamed ShadowDXS, a man of ample proportions who looked like Hugo from the TV series Lost. (Topiary went on to tweet something about Hugo from Lost, but then deleted it, thinking it was too silly. The Jester came to believe this signified a cover-up, that Sabu was someone actually named Hugo.) Before the PBS hack, Topiary, Shadow, Pwnsauce, and about fifteen Anons whom they knew from AnonOps had all gone on TinyChat on Saturday night and gotten drunk while chatting via text, with a few on voice and even fewer on webcam. Topiary ended up posting a series of drunken tweets to several thousand followers through his personal account, including, “dudd, you have no idea how uch hotgowg repeat the same proces as the nigger behing barry shadow exx rainbows ubunche fa…” People kept sending him telephone numbers, hoping for a good show, and Topiary kept prank-calling them. The next morning Barrett Brown woke up to several voice mails from Topiary saying he was “pursuant to being pursuant” as well as messages from a few raunchy transvestites who’d been given Brown’s number and promised a “booty call.” Topiary slept through most of Sunday, then, out of curiosity, dialed one of the many random U.S. numbers on his call history from the night before. He got an angry man with a Southern accent who said, “If you call me again you stupid Indian prick I’ll chop your fucking head off.” Topiary couldn’t remember the man at all but figured he’d had a good time with him. The fun that night seemed to overlap with LulzSec itself. Booze had put Topiary on a high when he was doing prank calls. LulzSec’s small audience and the team’s capabilities did the same when they were hitting PBS. To Sabu’s later annoyance, Topiary’s Nyan Cat page seemed to say that this hack wasn’t about Assange but about lulz. To drive the point home, in the early hours of Monday British time, Topiary got into NewsHour’s content management system, essentially the system PBS used for publishing stories to its website, and realized he could publish a legitimate-looking news story directly on the PBS NewsHour website. At first he wanted to make it about Obama choking on a marshmallow. But when he suggested it to the others in the group, they decided a better story would be about Tupac Shakur, the American rapper who had been fatally shot in Las Vegas in 1996 but who in death had enjoyed Elvis-like rumors that he was still alive. In about fifteen minutes Topiary had written up an elaborate story, paragraph by paragraph, in the IRC chat, titled “Tupac Found Alive in New Zealand”: Prominent rapper Tupac has been found alive and well in a small resort in New Zealand, locals report. The small town—unnamed due to security risks—allegedly housed Tupac and Biggie Smalls (another rapper) for several years. One local, David File, recently passed away, leaving evidence and reports of Tupac’s visit in a diary, which he requested be shipped to his family in the United States. “We were amazed to see what David left behind,” said one of [his] sisters, Jasmine, aged 31. “We thought it best to let the world know as we feel this doesn’t deserve to be kept secret.” David, aged 28, was recently the victim of a hit-and-run by local known gangsters. Having suffered several bullet wounds on his way home from work, David was announced dead at the scene. Police found the diary in a bedside drawer. “Naturally we didn’t read the diary,” one officer stated. “We merely noted the request to have it sent to a U.S. address, which we did to honor the wishes of David.” Officials have closed down routes into the town and will not speculate as to whether Tupac or Biggie have been transported to another region or country. Local townsfolk refuse to comment on exactly how long or why the rappers were being sheltered; one man simply says “we don’t talk about that here.” The family of David File have since requested that more action be taken to arrest those responsible for the shooting. “David was a lovely, innocent boy,” reported his mother. “When he moved to New Zealand, he’d never been happier.” His brother Jason requested that one part of David’s diary be made public in an attempt to decipher it. “Near the end,” Jason says, “there’s a line that reads ‘yank up as a vital obituary’, which we’ve so far been unable to comprehend.” David’s girlfriend, Penny, did not wish to make a statement. The final line in the elaborate story was a nod to HBGary’s Penny Leavy, while the phrase yank up as a vital obituary was another calling card: an anagram for Sabu, Kayla, Topiary, AVunit. PBS’s IT admins were scrambling in vain to reaccess their system; Sabu and Kayla were hitting them with a Denial of Service attack, so they were paralyzed. Topiary added a photo of Tupac Shakur to the story and clicked publish. Then he tweeted links to a Pastebin post of passwords for almost every journalist who worked with PBS, then to a post of all login passwords for PBS affiliate stations, then to a post of
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Begin Reading Table of Contents Cop
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his HBGary Federal account, possibl
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culture and key figures within it.
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dreadful fascination at his phone a
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Aaron Barr would never have come fa
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“nigger,” “faggot,” or just
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owns my ass.” With his other hand
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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 40 and 41: choose a unique nickname on AnonOps
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 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
Page 94 and 95: opposite of Kayla. And yet there wa
Page 96 and 97: one of the LulzSec accounts in resp
Page 98 and 99: on the network. He decided to try t
Page 100 and 101: morning of their meeting, William
Page 102 and 103: techniques like the Cain and Abel p
Page 104 and 105: hackers in private IRC rooms. It wa
Page 106 and 107: the open at the same time: the susp
Page 108 and 109: Kayla’s story had become more imp
Page 110 and 111: Stephane Fitch, who also introduced
Page 112 and 113: writes a spoof news article about t
Page 114 and 115: following twenty names in the ranki
Page 116 and 117: 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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