We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

symbol as much as a useful tool.
Storm could use his server to fling a hundred megabytes of junk traffic per second to a target. The process was not that different from
uploading a picture or movie to Facebook or to a file-sharing site. In that case, you are uploading something useful at perhaps four megabytes
a second. Storm’s extra server acted like an electric guitar amplifier, but increasing data speed, not sound.
Storm would use his server to aim junk packets at certain sections of the 2600 chat network, server nodes of the network known as leaves.
If you’re sending junk packets instead of useful data, it can overload a server and take it offline. An IRC network was like a tree, and 2600
had three so-called leaves. Instead of attacking the whole network at once, Storm flooded each individual leaf. Using this plan, he could
needle the hundreds of participants to scramble from one leaf to another instead of disconnecting altogether and waiting for the network to
come back up. The ultimate goal was to annoy them as much as possible.
Through the IRC command map, the LulzSec group could watch how many users were on each of their enemy network’s leaves. Before
Storm’s attack there had been about six hundred people on all leaves, and then the number started dropping. In just over ten minutes, one of
the leaves went down.
“It’s nulled,” said Storm.
“Haha,” said Kayla.
After seven minutes, as the users were jumping around to stay connected, Storm took down another leaf and kept it down for about fifteen
minutes. He let it up again for twenty minutes so participants would think everything was okay, and then he took it down again.
“I can’t even connect to 2600,” reported Kayla. Storm laughed.
“These guys are so fun to fuck,” said Topiary.
“Wait :D let us troll the shit out of them first :D,” said Kayla, “then we can PUSH/SYN/ACK/UDP them to oblivion hahahahahahaha.”
That was a reference to different types of junk packets. Attacking an entire network to get back at one annoying clique didn’t seem to strike
anyone in the group as an abuse of power or an act of bullying. Instead, with Storm now getting the limelight, Kayla couldn’t help but
mention her own successful attacks of the days of Chanology, and she started reminiscing about how she had DDoS’d three Chanology sites
for three weeks back in 2009—the incident where she had been stumbled upon by Laurelai.
“Ahaha that was you?” asked Topiary.
“Yes :D,” said Kayla.
“Gregg Housh was bitching about that.”
“A lot of people were bitching about it.”
“Sending packets of size 40…” Storm reported. Another server leaf was nulled. “Dude, they’re not gonna have anywhere to chat.” Now
three key servers hosting the 2600 chat network were down. He and Topiary started trying to connect to the network and couldn’t.
“Lolz,” said Storm.
“We should do this everyday until they refuse to house Jester,” said Topiary. He pointed out the small clique of people communicating
with Jester on Twitter, and Awinee, from Holland, was being especially vindictive. “These are the same guys who specifically went after
Sabu and our crew back in February with HBGary,” Topiary added. “They’re a lovable bunch of scoundrels.”
Topiary sent some messages from the LulzSec feed: “What’s wrong with irc.2600.net AKA Jester’s hideout? Oops, I think we just fucked
it. Sorry, Awinee and crew. Have fun explaining to the 2600.net admins that we just took down the entire network because of Jester people.
Uh-oh!”
Back on #pure-elite, weapons were still firing at the 2600 servers. “Should I let it back up?” Storm asked Topiary.
“Whatever you want.”
When he saw more criticism from Jester’s people on Twitter, Storm switched to a different type of junk packet. And as Awinee kept up his
rhetoric, LulzSec kept attacking. LulzSec was behaving like other hacker groups with its tit-for-tat behavior, except that more traditional
hackers wouldn’t have been riled up by a few relatively unskilled hecklers on Twitter. Perhaps it was because LulzSec was so open and
public, but it was the critics who spoke the loudest that seemed to get under the group’s skin the most.
Storm was proving a useful supporter with his DDoSing ability. In front of the crew, Topiary called him the LulzSec “cannonfire officer,”
working in tandem with Kayla, who was the group’s assassin and spy. “We dock in ports and she immerses, and eliminates.”
“I also bake cookies,” she added.
Everyone was laughing. They were all game for more attacks when Sabu finally entered the room. By now it was early in the morning
New York time.
“I wake up to Storm packeting, and Kayla excited,” he said. “What you niggas been doing without me?” There was a pause. His tone was
lighthearted, but the crew knew about his hot temper from the #HQ channel with Laurelai and about his general tendency to blow up at
others who disagreed with him. His presence made some a little anxious. If this had been real life, everyone might have been glancing at one
another or at the floor.
“Owning 2600.net,” said Storm. “About it.”
“Lol, they’re going to end up losing some servers,” said Sabu. “I want to own 2600 servers themselves.”
“That would be awesome,” Topiary said.
“Topiary my brother, how are you?” Sabu asked.
“Good Sabu, what’s up?”
“Nothing broscope. Just woke up, tired as balls.” Sabu took a break from the discussions, and people went back to planning ways to mess
with Jester’s crew or configuring software tools and scripts for future hacks.
Quickly the group was splitting into all manner of channels to find new leads for hacks or flush out spies. Hopping from channel to
channel and network to network was no trouble for these guys, some of whom were used to jumping around twenty-five IRC networks at the
same time.
When 2600 came back online, Topiary, Joepie91, and others started hopping over to the network to spy on its participants before coming
back to report new gossip. Rather brazenly, they then set up their own #LulzSec channel on the 2600 network. Pretty soon it was teeming
with dozens, then more than a hundred people. It was impossible to tell at first who they all were, but enough observation showed they were
a mixture of Anons, script kiddies, general fans who had heard about LulzSec from media reports, and white hat hackers. Over time the