We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

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
own side projects; Pwnsauce, for instance, had been working on a project to create a new type of encryption.
In the end, Topiary never invited anyone he knew into #pure-elite, and while Kayla had recommended a few friends, Sabu wasn’t
comfortable with letting them in either. According to Topiary, about 90 percent of the hackers who ended up in #pure-elite were Sabu’s
friends or acquaintances from the underground. The #pure-elite chat room was an invite-only hidden command center, but the original
founders would occasionally retreat to an even more secretive core channel to talk about the new recruits, the enemies, and, on rare
occasions, strategy. The atmosphere in #pure-elite was often buzzing as the crew celebrated over the latest attack and resultant media
attention. When M_nerva entered the room, he seemed to be noticing this for the first time.
“Lots of news coverage,” he said on the evening of May 31.
Topiary showed him a photo of the front page of the Wall Street Journal’s Marketplace section. The lead story had the headline “Hackers
Broaden Their Attacks” and the subtitle: “Almost Anyone Is a Target.’“ Underneath it was a large image of the cartoonish Nyan Cat image
they had uploaded to the PBS website, and the LulzSec monocled man. Above the rainbow emanating from Nyan Cat’s butt as it flew
through space was the Internet meme “All your base are belong to LulzSec.” It was a most surreal combination of old media and Internet
subculture.
“Fucking Wall Street Journal printed a Twitter name and a fucking cat in space,” said Topiary, incredulous.
The group was shooting the breeze mostly, chatting about the technical intricacies of Internet browsers, while Topiary would drop updates
on the group’s Bitcoin donations. Participants would report on leaks they were being offered by other hackers outside the group and,
increasingly, on what LulzSec’s enemies were up to. These antagonists were made up of online colleagues Backtrace and hackers like The
Jester; both camps often chatted together on the 2600 IRC network. There was no requirement to being invited into the #pure-elite room and
no rules other than the obvious one to keep everything that was said there secret. The channel topic, set by Sabu, always said: “NO LEAKS
—RESPECT EACH OTHER—RESEARCH AND EXPLOIT DEV!” The one policy of #pure-elite was that no one was to store chat logs
from the channel.
The secondary crew generally knew their place, aware that directions would come from Sabu, Topiary, and Kayla, and they were meant to
be followed. Overall, they were happy to be coming along for the ride, though a few were shocked at the backlash LulzSec was getting.
“By the way,” Storm said one evening. “FailSec? WTF is this shit?” He was referring to another Twitter account with a few hundred
followers that had been set up to publicly heckle LulzSec with messages like “Load fail cannons!” and ominous hints that the team would
soon be in jail.
“Storm, we’ve had stalkers like that for months,” said Topiary. “They follow us everywhere we go. They monitor everything we do. They
make parodies of our accounts.” He thought for a moment then added, “We’re kind of like a rock band.” With stardom came infamy. Some
of their detractors were so obsessed with heckling LulzSec that when Topiary blocked one on Twitter, the detractor would create two or three
more accounts to keep talking.
Kayla pointed out that Adrian Lamo, the hacker who claimed to have outed the WikiLeaks alleged mole, Private Bradley Manning, had
even registered the web address LulzSec.com to stop the team from using it as a website. Lamo, age thirty and diagnosed with Asperger’s
syndrome, had been called the “world’s most hated hacker” for passing information on Manning to military intelligence.
Storm offered to find a different URL, but Topiary declined. He and Tflow were already designing a simple-looking official site for
LulzSec in their spare time. Naturally, the background would be of the Nyan Cat flying in space and would borrow the design template of
HBGary.com.
“Night guiz,” M_nerva suddenly said.
“Night,” said three of the others. M_nerva signed off. It was nighttime in the United States, but LulzSec and its supporters were bored and
looking for things to do.
“Wanna find something to hit?” Topiary asked the room.
“Sure,” said Storm.
“There’s a shit cool site, FBI.gov,” said Topiary jokingly. There was a pause.
“Are you really that open to just going to jail?” Storm said.
“I suppose we could piss off some IRC for lulz,” said Topiary, pointing to a less risky target.
“Sure,” Storm said. Topiary and Kayla decided that, high on their victory against PBS, it was time to go after their biggest detractor, The
Jester. They would not just spam his channel #Jester and boot off his so-called Jesterfags but flood the entire 2600 chat network with junk
traffic and take all of it offline. It may have housed hundreds of participants, but it was still The Jester’s hideout, and Topiary hoped that the
result would be the 2600 admins getting angry not at LulzSec but at The Jester for provoking them. Topiary was sure that The Jester’s
supporters included people like Emick and Byun from Backtrace and considered sending spies into his channel at some point to see what
they were up to, maybe profile some of its members. If Jester’s people were trying to provoke, it was working. Topiary and the others had
become increasingly irritated by The Jester over the past few days and now were set on attacking his crew for both fun and revenge.
“Best thing to do when bored,” said Kayla in #pure-elite, “go to 2600 irc and just cause drama :D.”
“Should we just go on over to 2600, flame them, and then packet it?” Topiary said, already getting ready for the action. He connected to
the 2600 network to get a firsthand view of the network going down.
Storm’s role was to launch a Denial of Service (DoS) attack on the 2600 network. This was like a DDoS but without the extra D for
“distributed,” since Storm was sending junk packets from a single computer or server, not from multiple machines. (It was a loose term in any
case—if your computer was running a virtual machine, or VM, and you launched a DoS attack, that could be considered more than one
computer and thus a DDoS attack.) How could one computer launch a DoS attack against an IRC network? It would need a server or two to
help amplify the data transfer. Sabu had used a similar method for his attack on the Tunisian government, though to a much greater degree,
with the help of broadcast servers that he’d claimed to secretly hijack from a hosting company in London. Storm rented a basic server, so
while his attack wasn’t as powerful, it could easily take down a small IRC network. Many people in Anonymous and in hacker circles,
particularly those who acted as operators for AnonOps IRC, rented or owned servers. Controlling a server was more common than
controlling a botnet; it was like owning a nice car. You paid good money for it but were happy to let other people ride in what was a status
symbol as much as a useful tool.