We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

etter database encryption than Sony. In fact, by this time, rumor had it that the PlayStation Network had been hacked because a disgruntled
employee at Sony had given hackers an exploit; the breach had occurred two weeks after Sony had fired several employees responsible for
network security. Rumor also had it that those hackers had sold the database of more than a hundred million users for $200,000.
Kayla stumbled upon another Sony database that looked exploitable but did not bother to look inside. As per the usual custom, she pasted
its location into the chat room for someone else to scan. When Topiary finally opened the database, he found a table with rows and rows of
names and numbers that seemed to go on forever. Looking around he finally noticed a counter at the top with the number 3.5 million. It
looked like coupons of some sort. It felt like getting an exceptionally good Christmas present.
“Sabu, this one is pretty massive,” Topiary called. Sabu came over and proceeded to poke around the new, massive database before
coordinating the team’s gathering of it all.
“Wave bye-bye to Sony,” one of the team remarked.
“Kayla can you take users?” Sabu asked. He assigned one person to take care of the music codes, another the 3.5 million coupons, and
Sabu himself took the admin tables. There were four core members and two other secondary-crew members helping out.
This was the kind of labor that would have put off a single hacker toiling alone. It involved downloading reams of data, sometimes
manually. The work was monotonous and could take days. But as a group effort, the whole process suddenly became faster and more
compelling, the team members motivated by the fact that this was a target they were about to publicly embarrass. The tasks of compiling the
databases—one of 75,000, one of 200,000—took each person between a day and several days to complete, depending on how detailed the
information he or she was dealing with was. Each member then set up a computer to download each database. The files were so big that it
would take three weeks to download them, typically in the background of whatever else was being done online.
The team eventually decided they wouldn’t keep any of the coupons—they had tried taking them and got to only 125,000 when they
realized the downloads were happening at the glacial rate of one coupon a second; all told the whole thing would take several more weeks.
They didn’t have the time or resources to cope with such a huge download. Instead, they took a sample of this and a sample of that to
demonstrate that they had gained access. They would also publish the exact location of the server vulnerability in the Sony Pictures site that
led to the data (the Ghostbusters page) so that anyone who wanted could dive in to loot the bounty before Sony’s IT admins patched the hole.
Sabu gathered all the data together, and Topiary dressed the numbers and passwords up to make everything look palatable to a mass
audience. “We have a lot of different files for various Sony sites,” he explained. “Press—less smart press—will get confused. Gotta have a
summary document.” He would publish several documents revealing the heist in one big folder. He created a file called For Journalists that
explained what they had found, using words that would grab headlines, such as compromised instead of stolen.
Topiary had been up since six o’clock that morning to keep up with Sabu’s time zone, but he wasn’t feeling tired. On Twitter he was
counting down to their official release time, building anticipation among followers and the media. Gawker’s Adrian Chen quickly posted a
story headlined “World’s Most Publicity Hungry Hackers Tease Impending Sony Leak.”
Topiary had gone through the Sony Pictures database looking for anyone with a .gov or .mil e-mail address. He found a few and started
posting their names and passwords on Twitter. Then At 5:00 p.m. eastern time on the same day that Sony finally restored its PlayStation
Network, Topiary published everything.
“Greetings folks. We’re LulzSec, and welcome to Sownage,” he said in the introduction. “Enclosed you will find various collections of
data stolen from internal Sony networks and websites, all of which we accessed easily and without the need for outside support or money.”
LulzSec was kicking Sony just as it was getting back up.
Thirty-eight minutes after the release, Aaron Barr tweeted that LulzSec had released stolen Sony data. “The amount of user data appears
significant.” In forty-five minutes fifteen thousand people had looked at the message, a rate of eighteen people a second, and two thousand
had downloaded the package of Sony data from file-sharing website MediaFire.
Topiary didn’t have time to sit back and watch the fallout. He and Tflow were putting up the new LulzSec website, complete with a retro–
Nyan Cat design and the soft tones of American jazz singer Jack Jones singing the theme song of The Love Boat in the background. The
home page showed Topiary’s revamped “Lulz Boat” lyrics as plain black text in the middle. A link at the bottom offered viewers the option
of muting it—when clicked, the link raised the volume by 100 percent. Sabu initially hated the website and yelled at Topiary and Tflow for
creating something that had the potential to be DDoS’d, which would make the team look weak. Eventually Topiary convinced him that they
should keep it.
They moved quickly to put the site in place, then worked to ensure it didn’t collapse under the weight of thousand of visitors and the
inevitable DDoS attacks from enemy hackers. They also made sure the torrent file of Sony data stayed up, that there weren’t any more
LulzSec Bitcoin donations (they totaled $4 so far), and that everything else was in check. The LulzSec Twitter feed now had 23,657
followers, and there were dozens more people pouring into the public #LulzSec chat room. Topiary would go to bed and find it difficult to
sleep knowing that he was getting new tweets every two minutes. It was chaotic, but satisfying. He would go back onto Twitter with greater
confidence each day, dismissing his detractors with withering put-downs and keeping the followers enticed. If LulzSec announced a new
operation, it was now guaranteed to get on the news.
Often they didn’t need to go into the details of what they were about to do—the media and the public often assumed that LulzSec was
causing more damage than it really was. But as people’s expectations rose, the stakes went higher.
“We don’t want to be the hacking group that just leaks once a week some little thing,” Topiary said at the time. “We will only do big
things from now on…Unless we find someone we don’t like.”
One of those “big things” was imminent. The time had come for LulzSec to play its ace card and announce the hack on Infragard.
“Welcome to FuckFBIFriday, wherein we sit and laugh at the FBI,” Topiary announced on Twitter. “No times decided, but we’ll cook up
something nice for tonight.