We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

them that he was back. Topiary at first didn’t care that Sabu might have been lying—he was just glad to speak to him again. Not long after,
Sabu changed his story and said that it had actually been the anniversary of his grandmother’s death. When they had first spoken, Sabu had
probably changed his voice deliberately to make his story sound more genuine. By then, the FBI was logging everything that Sabu said
online to LulzSec’s members, as well as everything he said on the phone to Topiary.
Sabu would end up being offline more than usual for the next few days as he began collaborating with the FBI, even working out of their
office on a daily basis. Sabu occasionally kept his group abreast of other developments, but the still oblivious Topiary took more
responsibility for the team.
As a precaution, Topiary deleted more files, then he redid all his passwords and encryptions to make them ultra-protected. He kept all
passwords in a file on an encrypted SD card, with one character in each swapped around. Only he knew which characters were swapped.
Still, he couldn’t help constantly looking outside his window and jumping whenever a van drove past. For the first time, he started seriously
wondering if a couple of men in police uniforms would splinter his door at dawn the next morning.
A few days earlier when he had been out to buy some food, one of the local druggies had approached Topiary on his way home. “Hey,”
the man had said, waving as Topiary took out his earbuds.
“There were some police knocking on your door the other day,” the man said in a thick Scottish accent. Topiary’s heart had started to
pound.
“Really. What did they do?”
“They drove by in their car. Then a couple of them came out and knocked on your door, but there was no answer,” he said, shrugging.
Topiary played it cool. The druggie might have been lying, but the police might also have stopped by while he was at his thinking spot,
looking over the sea. And it was just as likely that they were doing a drug sweep of the area. Still, he resolved to wipe every shred of Topiary
and Anonymous from his laptop, encrypt whatever he kept, and send it to all to himself in an e-mail via Hushmail. Eventually he would wipe
his laptop completely.
If the police came to his door, they’d find a clean house with one rarely used desktop computer and his innocuous-looking Dell laptop, a
couple of extra monitors for watching films, and one phone line going over his living room with clips. None of the empty pizza boxes
associated with basement-dwelling hackers. Any documents the police might find about Anonymous on either of his computers could be
passed off as research Topiary was doing for a book. They’d find some pirated music and a handful of databases holding a few hundred
thousand names and passwords he had acquired from acquaintances or from his own scanning for LulzSec. Topiary called it his personal
collection. Sometimes he used it for his own attempts at doxing people, but for the most part it was just nice to have.
He tried not to think that his virtual private network provider, HideMyAss, would ever turn him in to the authorities. His logic was that if
customers of HideMyAss ever found out the company had turned in one of its users, they’d leave in droves, and HideMyAss would go out of
business. They would surely never give him up.
As Sabu remained offline on the pretext of dealing with family matters, a familiar face came back into the LulzSec fold: Ryan. It made little
sense at first, considering Ryan’s temperamental behavior in the past and his cyber attacks on the LulzSec communication channels, but that
was hacker life for you. Even the most explosive of disputes could be remedied when someone needed something. In this case Ryan needed
some friends, and LulzSec could use Ryan’s mammoth botnet, which infected computers via a rogue Facebook app. Ryan was well
connected in the underground hacker scene and served as an administrator of Pastebin, the text application tool that LulzSec used to publish
all its leaks, and Encyclopedia Dramatica. Ryan was like the kid in school that people didn’t necessarily like but whom they were compelled
to befriend because he had a brand-new Hummer and a house with a pool. Ryan wasn’t rich in real life, but online he seemed loaded; he had
spent years building up an impressive array of assets, from servers to his botnet. His servers helped host Encyclopedia Dramatica, and after he
had reconnected with a member of the LulzSec crew in the previous week, they also hosted LulzSec’s new IRC network, lulzco.org.
After Topiary first reconnected with Ryan on IRC, he wanted to hear what the new ally sounded like in voice to better suss him out, so the
two became contacts on Skype. When Ryan’s voice came through, his English accent was so strong, he sounded almost Australian. Ryan
spoke at a rapid-fire pace, openly bragging about his botnet, his hacking, and how he was making money on the underground; he littered his
prose with swearwords then described at great length a farmhouse-bread ham sandwich his mother had once made him. Ryan seemed pretty
unhinged and insecure, but Topiary’s opinion of him softened when he explained why he’d leaked hundreds of names from AnonOps
months before. The network operators had been hassling him, and then someone else had gathered all the data and given it to him to leak. It
was water under the bridge. Oh, he added, and that dox of his full name, address, and phone number that had been posted online? That was
based on fake information he had created four years ago. Ryan assured Topiary that he had made the false documents and spread them
everywhere so that his real information would remain hidden.
Topiary figured he could tell when someone was bullshitting, especially when it was in voice. Ryan, he believed, was genuine. In fact,
Topiary started to feel sorry for the guy. People on AnonOps had accused Ryan of being a perpetually angry cretin who logged and attacked
everything. But he wasn’t really angry; he was just passionate. Perhaps he came across as rude, but he worked hard and got into things,
Topiary thought. With Sabu gone, Topiary missed having someone passionate and a little crazy to talk to, to counteract his laid back
personality.
Ryan promised not to log any of the chats, and said he would give the LulzSec crew complete control over his logging ability. He also said
the team could use his botnet any time they wanted. He had used it in the past to prank DDoS sites of the U.S. Air Force and then call them
afterward to mock them. He could also make hundreds of dollars a day by subletting the botnet to others who wanted to use it for nefarious
purposes like extortion and hacker skirmishes. But LulzSec could use it for free. This was like fresh meat to a ravenous dog: with Ryan’s
botnet, LulzSec could bring down almost any website it wanted at the drop of a hat.
During one of Sabu’s occasional drop-ins on IRC, he mentioned to Topiary that he did not like having Ryan as a supporter. LulzSec was
making too many contacts, he added. (It is unclear if this was the case, or why that might have concerned him now that he had started
working as an FBI informant.) Topiary argued back that Sabu himself had been inviting his trusted associates into #pure-elite, including log
leaker M_nerva. Topiary won the argument, and Ryan stayed. With Sabu mostly away now, Topiary was enjoying the funnier side of what
LulzSec could do with its growing stable of Twitter followers. After he released the administrative passwords of fifty-five porn sites and
twenty-six thousand porn passwords, he got replies from people on Twitter saying they had used the data dump to hack into other people’s e-