We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

like his cooker, fridge-freezer, and bed frame, packing his books, playing his Xbox. His mother and brother had moved to a suburb in
England, and he was planning to join them, then find his own place in the southeast region of Kent. He’d bought a sixty-five-liter backpack
to prepare for his big move, and he would fit everything else into his laptop bag and a small suitcase. He chatted frequently with Kayla, with
whom he was still good friends. She claimed to be on vacation in Spain with her dad and a friend, and on Twitter she dispensed
extraordinarily detailed stories about hearing noises from the hotel room above her and splashing in the pool. Between these anecdotes, Kayla
would teach Topiary more about hiding himself online and “reverse trolling.” He had set up an e-mail address, Topiaryhatemail@gmail.com,
and posted it on the bio of his personal Twitter account. If anyone sent a malicious link to the account, he and Kayla would grab it and
reverse-engineer it, then embarrass whoever was trying to infect him. It was a bit of lighthearted fun.
After a week, he signed back onto AnonOps IRC and was inundated with about fifteen private messages. People asked him questions
about LulzSec. They showed him website vulnerabilities, invited him into secret channels.
“Fuck, it’s THE Topiary,” someone said without any hint of sarcasm. The Anons were desperate to get him to respond to their comments
and questions, and several followed him from channel to channel. One person sent him seven hundred FBI logins. Another asked for advice
on destroying a few lawyers. He was asked to help with five different operations. Everything seemed to have gotten a bit more loopy since
he’d left, even the operators.
“Topiary, you worm. You anarchist. I love you, bro,” said the AnonOps operator Evilworks. “I bet my left nut that government is
DDoSing us.…But I have news for you. AnonOps ain’t going down. NEVER EVER.”
“My private message windows were flying,” Topiary remembered. “People I’d known from the writing channel back in January were
reminding me of who they were, even though I remembered them perfectly.” One anonymous user even mashed his keyboard in excitement
when Topiary started talking back to him, saying he didn’t expect “someone like Topiary” to respond. “This made me feel mindfucked to say
the least.”
If he came up with a new channel, named something like #BananaEchoFortress, within minutes it would have a dozen people in it simply
because so many were making /whois requests on his name to see which channels he was in.
“I couldn’t help but wonder what I had done to deserve this much praise,” he said. “I’m far from the most skilled hacker or comedian,
writer, or designer.” Topiary came to the conclusion that, throughout the first half of 2011, he was simply in the right places at the right times,
supported by the right people.
Topiary eventually came across a new op that he couldn’t say no to. He didn’t want to get too involved, but a hacker with ties to LulzSec had
found a vulnerability in the website for the Sun, a tabloid that was the most popular newspaper in the United Kingdom. It was also a staple
title in News International, the media powerhouse owned by Rupert Murdoch. Around this time, the issue of hacking was all over the news
—not computer hacking, but phone hacking. The British government had just launched an investigation into reports that journalists from the
Murdoch paper the News of the World had hacked the phone of a murdered British schoolgirl and then hindered the case after deleting some
of her voice mails. Phone hacking was an open secret in the British press, used most often on celebrities. In fact, the way to listen to someone
else’s voice mail was well known across 4chan and other image boards: you simply waited for a dial tone, then held down the # key and hit
the common password of “0000.” But news that reporters had hacked a murdered schoolgirl’s phone got the public baying for blood. With
Murdoch himself soon to be questioned by a parliamentary committee, it seemed a fitting time to cut Murdoch down to size.
The hackers who had contacted Topiary on AnonOps wanted him to write a spoof news story reminiscent of his Tupac article on PBS. It
was a simple job, and Topiary agreed, thinking it was a good idea. The hackers had managed to take almost absolute control over
theSun.co.uk and on July 18 broke into the tabloid’s network and redirected every link on the Sun’s website to Topiary’s story. It was
headlined “Media Moguls [sic] Body Discovered” and detailed how Murdoch had been discovered dead in his garden. Topiary couldn’t
leave it without a calling card for himself and one of the hackers, adding that Murdoch had “ingested a large quantity of palladium before
stumbling into his famous topiary garden.” When News International released an official statement about the attack, the hackers reconfigured
the page so it linked to the LulzSec Twitter feed.
Major news outlets picked up the story immediately, sending it to the top of Google News and saying that LulzSec had struck again.
Topiary got messages from the BBC and TV news reporters in the United States, Canada, and Australia seeking voice interviews, but he
declined every one. Sabu capitalized on the interest by announcing on Twitter that he was also sitting on a huge cache of the Sun’s e-mails,
then announced, “We’re working with certain media outlets who have been granted exclusive access to some of The News of the World emails
we have.” None of this was true, but several mainstream press outlets’ ears perked up in envy and they reported on the claim.
LulzSec had successfully made the world’s most powerful media man the butt of a joke that millions of people were laughing at. The day
after the Sun hack, Murdoch appeared before the parliamentary committee, and a rogue comedian took things a step further by shouting “You
naughty billionaire!” before throwing a shaving-cream pie at Murdoch’s face.
Rebekah Brooks, former editor of the Sun and the News of the World, was also being investigated for her knowledge of phone hacking. In
the midst of the police investigation, a police officer found that her husband had tried to discreetly dump her laptop in a black garbage bag
back behind their home. They retrieved it. Topiary read the story and thought that the couple should have melted the laptop. He considered
that was something he should do too but figured he could put it off. He was ready to turn over a new leaf, find a new apartment, and even
meet his online girlfriend for the first time. She was planning to fly over from Canada in September. But he wouldn’t wipe his laptop or say
good-bye to Anonymous just yet.
Then on July 20, two days after the Sun hack, Topiary was reading the news, and his heart leaped into his throat. According to a Fox news
report, British police had arrested a suspected core member of LulzSec in London, a man who went by the nickname Tflow. The official
statement said that the male they had arrested was sixteen. Topiary read that again. Tflow, the genius programmer who had written the
Tunisian anti-snooping web script, configured their website, compiled all that data, was just sixteen years old. He checked his IRC client and
saw the last message he’d received from Tflow had been just four hours before his arrest:
“Nice work with Sun. Do you guys have everything you need for a proper e-mail release? I don’t want to leave you guys hanging.” And
that was it. Tflow had been the most reserved member of LulzSec. Mysterious, mature, and quiet, he was assumed by most people on the
team to be in his twenties. He was a levelheaded programmer and evaded most questions about himself and his personal life—the complete