We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

on the network. He decided to try to hack her account.
He wrote down Selena’s e-mail address on a piece of paper, went to Hotmail, clicked on the link that said “Can’t access your account?,”
and then hit “Reset account.” He put in Selena’s e-mail address, then answered the security question: “What is your father’s hometown?”
Selena’s Facebook page showed that she lived in Joshua, Texas, which was the correct answer.
It then asked: “What is your grandfather’s occupation?”
William sighed. He signed into one of his fake Facebook profiles, Chrissie Harman, and sent Selena a direct message.
“There’s a group of hackers after you,” he told her without bothering to introduce himself. He pasted a screenshot of the thread from /b/
with her contact details as proof. William said he was part of this fictitious hacker gang and that they were dangerous. He was willing to help
but would need to be paid.
“How do I pay you?” Selena asked, worried.
“Take a photo of yourself with a shoe on your head and a time stamp.” In the past he would have wanted nude photos, but by now
William had plenty and couldn’t be bothered to ask. Sure enough, within a few minutes, Selena had taken a self-portrait and sent it over.
William felt a small victory.
“OK. Now I’ll ask you questions to help secure your account,” William said. He could have just told her to remove her security questions.
Instead he bombarded her with technical-sounding gibberish about “randomized answers,” “servers,” and “a database string input,” a
deliberate tactic in social engineering. Distract someone with enough misinformation and that person will forget what you are really trying to
get, or to hide. “Pick a number between 1 and 100,” he said. “What’s your mother’s middle name? Mine’s is Deborah.” After every answer
of hers, he replied, “Yes, that will work very well.”
Then he asked, “What does your grandfather do?”
“Oil,” Selena said. William opened his other window and quickly typed oil into Hotmail. Nothing. He tried oil operative, oil technician,
and oil executive. They didn’t work either. He would have to try something else.
“Ok. My questions will get more technical now, but don’t worry,” William said. “This will really secure it. After this you’ll be un-hackable
forever.” He asked Selena how many e-mail accounts she had and how many characters were in her average password. Then he asked her to
type out her Hotmail password backward.
“Here’s mine,” he offered, pasting gibberish. Selena hesitated, then she typed it out. Within a few minutes, William had gotten into her email
account, and then he activated a series of steps that allowed him to reset her Facebook account too, still asking her questions so she
wouldn’t get suspicious.
Before she could answer his last question, he went into her account settings and signed her out. He set up secure browsing to mask his IP
address, then changed the password again. He went back to /b/.
“I’m in this girl’s account,” he said, starting a new thread and pasting a link to her Facebook profile. “Give me ideas for things to do.” One
person suggested talking to Selena’s boyfriend, a local boy named James Martinez. William decided that was a good idea. He went ahead
and changed Selena’s relationship status from “in a relationship” to “single” then sent boyfriend James a direct message.
“OMG I accidentally made us single!” he told him, now in the guise of Selena. “Can you give me your password so I can log into your
Facebook and accept our relationship status again?” James agreed, but when he sent over the password boobies1, it didn’t work.
Exasperated, William passed the work on James off to another prankster on /b/. That was the benefit of having a /b/ behind you—if you
got stuck on a problem, someone else could help you fix it. A couple of /b/ users had by now contacted William via their own fake Facebook
profiles, and one, who used the fake name Ben Dover, offered to get James’s correct password. Soon enough, James realized he wasn’t
talking to his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Selena, but a malicious hacker. The Caps Lock went on.
“I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR HEAD IN,” he told William, who laughed.
“It was possibly the funniest moment of the night for me,” William later said. “I really like it when people get angry without realizing how
helpless they are. It’s like walking up to the biggest man in a nightclub and saying ‘I’ll knock you out.’ It’s just not going to happen.”
James’s tirade had continued. “I’m going to slit your throat you faggot,” he wrote. In another window, Ben Dover reported that he was
almost in James’s Facebook account.
“I’m going to do it now,” Ben finally said.
“Ok do it now,” said William.
There was silence from James for about ten minutes. Then came a new message from James’s account in the same chat window: “I’m in.”
It was Ben. William smiled. After chatting to Ben more, William realized he was a /b/rother who understood the art of trolling softly. This
was a more subtle form of pranking. For example, it was funny to hack someone’s Facebook profile and post porn on his wall, but funnier
still to make it seem that the person had accidentally uploaded a porn link himself.
William and Ben set up a private Facebook group and pasted a link to it on /b/. After half an hour about fifty other fake Facebook profiles,
all linked to /b/ users, had joined. The group discussed ideas for what to do next.
For now, William wanted to keep Selena’s Facebook login credentials to himself. Selena, with her network of three thousand Facebook
friends, was the jewel in his crown. As soon as he signed in to her account, ten tabs of chat messages flashed up from boys trying to talk to
her. It was a reminder of how big a magnet teenage girls could be online and how blinded a man could become when he thought he was
talking to one. This was the benefit the person behind Kayla found in being a sixteen-year-old girl online. William picked one of the boys
trying to chat to Selena, Max Lopez, and sent a reply.
“Hey, babe :),” William wrote, still as Selena. “What you up to?” Max responded, and the two embarked on inane small talk, Max
oblivious of the fact that he was actually talking to a twenty-one-year-old man in the United Kingdom.
“I’m kinda horny :D,” William typed out. The conversation that followed was like hundreds William had had before. Weeks later, when
William described it in a quiet café, he looked off to the side, his hands held firmly together. As he searched for the memory, he seemed to
enter a trance, suddenly reciting an oddly seductive dialogue as if he were Selena again:
“Sorry,” he had told Max Lopez, “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s terrible.”
“It’s alright,” Max had replied.
“My boyfriend never does anything these days and I just want to be really slummy.”