We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

“Y’all were the inspiration I needed to mess with my roommate’s Facebook beyond all repair,” said another.
“Good to see some refreshing carnage,” Topiary told the horde, whom he now referred to as lulz lizards; he called their intended victims
peons. “Releasing 62,000 possible account combinations is the loot for creative minds to scour. Think of it like digging a very unique
mineshaft.” Pretty soon more than forty thousand people had downloaded the database and were using it to hack all manner of social media
accounts.
LulzSec’s 220,000 Twitter followers had become a community for Topiary as much as an audience. For the next few days he was
constantly joking with them on Twitter, telling the FBIPressOffice Twitter account that “we pissed in your Cheerios,” then funneling more
requests to hit other smaller websites and sending the Twitter followers to a funny video and watching the site crash.
Anyone who had met Topiary would see hardly any similarity between his real-life persona and the cocksure voice he used as LulzSec’s
front man. It was all an act, and to him it felt like acting. A few times he would try to sound like Sabu or Kayla so that it would look like
more than one person was manning the feed, but for the most part he was speaking for the monocled man with the top hat. And dozens of
people constantly asked how they could join in.
“We’ve got all this attention now,” Topiary said quietly to his core team, “and people asking to join us. How about I write something about
the new Antisec movement attacking governments and banks? Is everyone up for that?”
The others in the team, including Sabu, said yes. With a respected name like WikiLeaks now silently behind them it made sense to, for
once, put a serious face on what they were doing. Straightaway Topiary wrote up a new official statement saying that Antisec would “begin
today,” calling on more people to join the cyber insurgency LulzSec was spontaneously reviving. On the evening of Sunday, June 19, he
published a statement inviting white hats, black hats, and gray hats, and just about anyone else, to join the rebellion. Later he said that writing
it was, as usual, like writing a piece of fiction:
“Salutations Lulz Lizards,” it started. “As we’re aware, the government and whitehat security terrorists across the world continue to
dominate and control our Internet ocean…We are now teaming up with Anonymous and all affiliated battleships….We fully endorse the
flaunting of the word ‘Antisec’ on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art.…Top priority is to steal and leak any
classified government information, including email spools and documentation. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking
establishments.”
Not really that interested in hitting banks and governments but more interested in how people would respond to the call to arms, he posted
the official statement and headed to bed. His mind was still racing after another chaotic day keeping up with the media, his constantly
changing passwords, the fast-paced operations, the new supporters, the tweets, the reactions, the uproar, the chaos of seeing more than a
thousand news and blog posts written over a Pastebin post he’d typed out on Notepad. He had never expected this much to happen when he
and Sabu had first discussed getting the team back together. It did not feel like things were spiraling out of control, at least not yet. If
anything, Topiary was starting to feel that old, familiar itch in the back of his mind. A sense that this latest experience in disrupting the
Internet through LulzSec had run its course and was becoming tedious. It was an echo of the restlessness he’d felt with AnonOps only a few
months ago.
In the meantime, Ryan had become increasingly annoying to Topiary with his lonely and desperate bids for attention. A couple of days
earlier, after twelve hours away from his computer because he’d been asleep, Topiary found more than a dozen messages from Ryan on his
laptop asking why he was being ignored.
Of course, there was no way Topiary could stop. He was the main mouthpiece of LulzSec and a prime motivator for the team and its
supporters, and leaving would be an enormous practical and emotional effort.
It was hard to sleep. Topiary now habitually glanced out of his window whenever he heard a car drive past. He said privately that he was
expecting a raid any day. Acceptance seemed the best way to deal with these things. His emotions lurched from the high of an outrageous
new leak to the gut-wrenching paranoia that he was about to get doxed or, worse, raided. Ryan thought the same. He claimed he often went
to sleep each night expecting to be raided the next day.
“I’ve given up caring,” Topiary said. Was he imagining what jail might be like? “I don’t like to think about that,” he answered. He also
couldn’t help thinking about the second, stiffly worded tweet that Greg Hoglund had added just few days before, the one he had blithely
dismissed at the time.
“Aaron,” Hoglund had said. “I wanted to be here to see the fruits of our labour over the last two months. LOL.”
Topiary woke up on Monday, June 20, to a surprise. There had been a much bigger response to his Antisec statement than he had
anticipated. Tens of thousands of people had read it (eventually almost a quarter of a million accessed the page) and the media was eagerly
reporting the line that LulzSec had “teamed up with Anonymous” and declared war on just about everything in a position of authority in the
hope of rooting out corruption. It seemed that cyber anarchists everywhere were running amok. That day CBS local TV news for San Diego
reported on some mysterious black graffiti that had appeared on the boardwalk along Mission Beach: a crudely drawn man in a top hat and
mustache and the words “Antisec” in a speech bubble.
“I was taken aback,” Topiary later remembered. “My Notepad-forged declaration of Antisec had the AnonOps servers teeming with users.
It was like Operation Payback’s prime on steroids. For a while I felt horribly guilty for some reason. The words were almost fiction to me,
just another piece of writing, but it got through to so many people, who were now putting their necks on the line for the cause. Someone had
even gone out and tagged beach walls with Antisec, getting on the news.”
Ryan was also galvanized by the new mass enthusiasm for Antisec. Naturally, he became more eager than ever to put his botnet to good
use. Later that day he started trying to lash out at other major targets: Britain’s Ministry of Finance, then the NSA, then the FBI. Finally, he
successfully hit the site for the U.K.’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Anything ending in .mil or .gov, he wanted to get. Topiary
watched, transfixed, and after a while decided it would be good to calm Ryan down. He didn’t want things getting out of hand. Even so, he
didn’t want to let LulzSec’s credit for the SOCA hit go to waste, so he announced it on Twitter, again without the usual loud flair. “Tango
down—soca.gov.uk—in the name of Antisec.”
Compared to the CIA, this felt like a minor attack, and it hadn’t even completely worked, since the SOCA site was down only for certain
visitors. But moments later, someone at SOCA sent an e-mail to London’s Metropolitan Police saying the website had been brought down.
Ryan had been launching DDoS attacks from his computer for many months, but now, finally, the police were spurred into action.