We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

Ryan had been launching DDoS attacks from his computer for many months, but now, finally, the police were spurred into action.
Later that same Monday, at around 10:30 p.m., while Ryan was still DDoSing the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, ten
police cars quietly pulled up outside his house. The address they’d been given belonged to Ryan Cleary, a nineteen-year-old computer nerd
who lived with his parents in a nondescript, semidetached house in Essex, England. It turned out the dox that Ryan had claimed was fake
was real. He really did live at that address, and he really had been using his actual first name this whole time. When the police entered his
rectangular bedroom, they found windows covered in foil to block out any sunlight, a single bed, a messy desk covered in potato chips, and
allegedly about £7,000 (about $11,340, based on the exchange rate that day) in cash in his desk drawer. Ryan was pale, had a boyish wisp of
a mustache, and was a little on the chubby side. The last time he had been outside the house was Christmas—six months earlier.
The police questioned Ryan for five hours, then said they were arresting him. At around 2:00 a.m. he signed off from MSN with the quit
message “leaving.” It wasn’t the “brb Feds at the door” inside joke, but neither was it the leaving message he normally used. The police
drove him in the early hours of Tuesday morning back to Charing Cross police station in Central London for further questioning. At that
moment, agents from the FBI were on a plane headed for London, and Topiary was fast asleep in his bed, completely oblivious to what was
happening.
That morning, London’s Metropolitan Police announced that an eighteen-year-old had been arrested and charged with launching DDoS
attacks on several organizations. Within hours, Britain’s tabloid newspapers had picked up the news, followed by major media outlets in the
United States. Though the police hadn’t mentioned LulzSec in their release, several newspapers reported, strangely, that the “mastermind” of
LulzSec had been arrested.
When Topiary signed in to the LulzSec private chat rooms the next morning, there was the same kind of frightened chatter that had
accompanied Sabu’s disappearance. Topiary slowly realized what was going on. Still, Tflow and Sabu said they were relieved. They had
heard about the arrest on the news and each said they thought it was Topiary.
“Ryan is now fucked beyond all belief,” Topiary said. He felt numb. Eventually Ryan’s name was released and a newspaper got hold of
his family. They interviewed his mother, who talked about how she had to leave plates of food outside his door because he would never
leave his bedroom and how he had once almost killed himself when she tried to take his computer away. It printed a photo of Ryan as a doeeyed
schoolboy, along with a picture of his room. The photo had captions and arrows pointing out everything from the foil covering his
windows to the spoof-motivational poster on his wall of two semi-naked women and the title “Teamwork.” Topiary recognized it all from
their video chats. The newspapers didn’t seem to know the half of Ryan’s eccentricities. The windowsill was where Ryan had grown weed a
year before. His desk was now clear of litter and potato chips and had probably been cleaned by his mother. Just a week earlier Ryan had
grabbed a hypodermic needle and started stabbing his toe in front of the webcam. On top of all that, the idea of arrest now felt much closer to
home.
Sabu and Topiary spoke on the phone. They agreed to change their e-mail addresses and their public nicknames and everything Ryan
knew about because Ryan would snitch. They talked about finding new servers to host their IRC networks and the LulzSecurity website.
And for the public face, Topiary played it cool. “Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested,” he said on Twitter. “It’s all over now…
wait…we’re all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?”
There was one other errand to take care of: M_nerva. They had always known that the hacker who had leaked the #pure-elite chat logs
had worked with Ryan on some of his moneymaking schemes. With Ryan out of the picture, there was no need to hold back from M_nerva
anymore. It was safe to finally take revenge. Topiary published an official statement on Marshall “M_nerva” Webb, addressing it to the FBI
as a helpful offer of new information. “Snitches get stiches,” he had written, unaware that his closest confidant, Sabu, was a far more
dangerous snitch. The public was keen to see who had been the snitch, and the page got more than a thousand views in twenty seconds. It
took a few weeks for the FBI to follow up on the M_nerva information, but in late June, federal authorities would raid Webb’s home in Ohio.
In the meantime, there were now more than three hundred thousand people following LulzSec on Twitter, more than 135 eager people in
LulzSec Brazil, hacker groups in Spain and Iran wanting to join forces, constant offers of database dumps, control of a few dozen
government sites, and more than a gigabyte of data to release. It included twelve thousand passwords from a NATO website, hundreds of
random internal police documents, government documents, a video of the police accidentally dropping a dead body from a plane, photos of
human flesh scattered across pavements; “/b/ would love this stuff,” Topiary thought. He tried not to think about the fact that doing more
would pile on a greater jail sentence. He convinced himself that LulzSec had become like WikiLeaks—it was just leaking information that
other people had handed over.
The FBI, in the meantime, was racing to keep up with their new informant, who was plugged into this fast-moving world. As hackers
offered vulnerabilities to Sabu in secret IRC meetings, he passed them on to his new overseers so that those security holes could be fixed.
Sabu was deftly pulling the strings of LulzSec, putting on the face of genuine complicity while secretly helping the authorities prevent many
of those potential attacks from happening. With things moving so quickly, Topiary, Kayla, Tflow, and the others had no time to track how
many of them led to dead ends, thanks to Sabu. They were always on the lookout for the next big hit.
“We are challenging ourselves to progress to bigger things,” Topiary said at the time. “Funny, bigger targets.” There was no turning back
now.
Among the stream of offers Topiary and Sabu got for exploits and data, one stood out. It had been evening in Topiary’s part of the world
when a hacker who had been talking to Sabu and had then been unable to get through contacted Topiary to say he had access to hundreds of
secret files and user info after hacking into the Arizona police department network. He was an activist, passionately against the racial profiling
that took place in the state, and he wanted to release the data as retribution. Topiary recognized the name, since Sabu had mentioned it before.
After the hacker had uploaded the data to a secret server, Tflow, Pwnsauce, and Topiary all grabbed it to see what was inside. It was a folder
containing more than seven hundred documents. There were embarrassing e-mails complaining about a scared officer who had run and
hidden in a ditch during a recent shootout, innocuous details about a new safe-driving campaign, and home addresses and contact details for
Arizona police officers. Given enough digging, the hacker hoped his cache of documents could shed light on corrupt practices in the
department. The hacker made a convincing argument about systemic prejudice in the border police, and Topiary, employing his usual
carefree outlook on things, figured that the hacker should write his own press release—the first time anyone but Topiary would write one for
LulzSec. Tflow created a torrent file.