We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

they added. “What did [Topiary] mean by that? Taking credit? Red herring?” Very few people outside of the LulzSec team and a few of their
closest online friends knew that LulzSec was made up of the old HBGary hackers, and the anagram question was quickly drowned out.
Hundreds of people on Twitter were talking excitedly about this new hacking group and its audacious swoop on PBS. Many more started
following the @LulzSec Twitter feed to hear communiqués directly from Topiary. Almost at once, he was getting tens of thousands of
followers.
Chapter 19
Hacker War
The victory of the PBS attack had left Topiary in a daze of newfound fame and hubris. He knew he wasn’t leading the hacks or really even
partaking in their mechanics, but acting as the mouthpiece for LulzSec certainly made it seem to him, and sometimes to the others in the
group, like he was steering the ship. That meant speaking on behalf of LulzSec when he got into verbal tiffs with some often impassioned
enemies on Twitter.
The PBS hack had ushered a blast of attention from the media and earned the group a sudden wave of fans, with even the administrators of
Pastebin, the free text application that LulzSec was using to dump its spoils, apparently happy with the extra web traffic they got with each
release. But in a world already steeped in trolling, drama, and civil war, there were plenty of eager detractors. Jennifer Emick flung a few
diatribes at the LulzSec Twitter feed, as did the Dutch teenager Martijn “Awinee” Gonlag, who had been arrested in December of 2010
when he used the LOIC tool against the Netherlands government without hiding his IP address.
Awinee and many other “Twitter trolls” appeared to align themselves with The Jester, the ex-military hacker who had DDoS’d WikiLeaks
in December of 2010, then taken down the Westboro Baptist Church sites in February. He was never as dangerous as the actual police, but
he was certainly a source of drama and distraction. The Jester hung out in an IRC channel called #Jester, on a network aligned with the
magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
The name 2600 came from the discovery in the 1960s that a plastic toy whistle found inside certain boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the
United States created the exact 2,600 hertz tone that led a telephone switch to think a call was over. It was how early hackers of the 1980s,
known as phone phreaks, subverted telephone systems to their desires. Unlike AnonOps IRC, on the 2600 IRC network, any talk of illegal
activity was generally frowned upon. If people talked about launching a DDoS attack, they were discussing the technological intricacies of
such an attack. If 2600 was a weapons store where enthusiasts discussed double- and single-action triggers, AnonOps was the bar in a dark
alley where the desperadoes talked of who they’d like to hit next.
After hitting PBS, LulzSec’s founders decided that as attention to LulzSec grew, they would eventually need their own IRC network just
like AnonOps and 2600. Sabu also wanted to create a second tier of supporters, a close-knit network beyond the core six members that could
help them on hacks. The team had decided from the beginning that their core of six should never be breached or added to, and when Topiary
heard Sabu’s plans, he felt skeptical. Just look what had happened in #HQ when Kayla had invited Laurelai. But Sabu argued they needed at
least a fluid secondary ring of supporters. These were people that Sabu already knew from the underground and trusted 100 percent or they
weren’t in. Sabu had started talking to some of his old crew and he invited them into an IRC chat room they had created for these new
supporters, called #pure-elite, named after a website he had created for his hacking friends in 1999. These were genius programmers and
people with powerful botnets, veteran hackers from the 1990s who had gotten into the networks at Microsoft, NASA, and the FBI. The
combined skills of the group were almost frightening. Topiary reminded Sabu that he wasn’t comfortable with all the new people—it seemed
risky. Who knew; one of these people might leak logs, as Laurelai had done so devastatingly in #HQ. It also brought up the question of why
Sabu even needed him anymore.
All the same, he could hardly believe the company he was now in. He focused on picking up tips from the others. If they used hacker
terminology he didn’t understand, he would Google it: jargon like virtual machines, hacking methods like SQL injection, various types of
attack vectors and programming terminology. If he hit a brick wall, they could give him a quick summary.
Soon there were eleven supporters in #pure-elite to learn from, plus the original six. Sabu was still the main person to ask about finding
exploits; Kayla about securing yourself. AVunit and Tflow were still the experts in infrastructure. For Sabu, the extra supporters weren’t
there to teach him anything—he believed he and LulzSec were training them. Sabu tended to think of everyone in the subgroup as a student
and he told Topiary privately that he hoped this could lead to the start of another anti-security, or Antisec, movement. The last time Antisec
had been in the headlines was the early 2000s, when the Web’s disrupters were a few hundred skilled hackers, as opposed to the thousands
of Internet-savvy people joining Anonymous today.
By now Kayla and the others who had been scanning for big-name websites with security vulnerabilities had hundreds to work from. But
each one had be checked out, first to see if it could be exploited so that someone could enter the network, and second to see if there was
anything interesting to leak from it. All these things took time and were often done sporadically without roles being assigned. People would
volunteer to check a vulnerability out. LulzSec now had a raft of much bigger targets beyond PBS and Fox that they could potentially go
after, some with .mil and .gov web addresses. None of them corresponded to any particular theme or principle; if hackers found a high-profile
organization that looked interesting, they would go after it and explain their reasoning later. Knowing that Sabu had a tendency to inflate his
rhetoric about targets, Topiary did not yet understand what hitting some of these websites actually meant.
The associates were hackers like Neuron, an easygoing exploit enthusiast; Storm, who was mysterious but highly skilled; Joepie91, the
well-known and extremely loquacious Anon who ran the AnonNews.net website; M_nerva, a somewhat aloof but attentive young hacker;
and Trollpoll, a dedicated anti–white hat activist. In the most busy periods of LulzSec, both the core and secondary crew were in #pure-elite
or online for most of the day and sometimes through the night. Some were talented coders who could create new scripts for the team as their