LulzSec's Enemies List Might Be Its Members' Undoing - Technology - The Atlantic Wire

After FBI agents raided a home in Hamilton, Ohio on Monday, it came out that they were searching for a hacker associated with Lulz Security, the hactivist collective that disbanded last weekend after a 50-day campaign of mischief. The raid comes as flickers of tension and infighting among the group's former members have surfaced publicly online. It also follows the arrest and subsequent release on bail of a teenager said to be a key member of LulzSec, but whom the group says was "at best, a mild associate." Meanwhile, LulzSec itself has tried to out some of its former members who it says wronged it, while others online try to identify the group's key players. In other words: LulzSec's enemies are becoming a problem. The story lines of the group's many detractors are a bit tricky to unravel, but here's a partial list of outside enemies trying to expose LulzSec members as well as insiders who have turned on them:

The Jester: Known on Twitter as @th3J35t3r, he is a former military hacker who has been feuding with LulzSec on Twitter since the group first became active. Last week, the Jester claimed on Twitter to have outed the group in a pastebin posting. He also has a Wordpress blog where he details evidence of the identities of its members. He works alone and LulzSec hates his guts. The group posted a screed against him on Pastebin before it ceased operation. The Jester usually targets higher-profile terrorists, and is suspected in yesterday's takedown of al Qaeda's Web site.

The A-Team: This group of hackers made its debut this week when it published a large Pastebin post on Sunday, claiming to name members of LulzSec. So far, only one of those supposed LulzSec members has been raided, that we know of, and that raid happened before the A-Team's post. Laurelai Bailey, a 29-year-old from Davenport, Iowa, told Gawker's Adrian Chen this week that FBI members had raided her home last Thursday in a bid to get more information on LulzSec's members.

"They wanted to know if I could get close to them," Bailey says. "I told them these people hate me... it wouldn't do any good." Bailey says Lulz Security hackers hold a grudge against her for leaking logs from the secret chat room in which they planned the HBGary hack—which she says she did in retaliation for them harassing some of her friends.

Web Ninjas: This group doesn't want you to call them hackers. Per their blog, LulzSec Exposed, they're "cyber vigilantes." They've mostly focused on trying to make the case that Laurelai (who says on her own Twitter feed that she's transgendered), is a man named Steven Lacey, who lives in Ireland.

M_nerva and hann: Former LulzSec associates, these two raised the group's ire early on by leaking chat logs that eventually found their way to the pages of The Guardian. In response, LulzSec itself leaked their identities in a Pastebin post. M_nerva's address is listed in Hamilton, Ohio, so it seems like a good bet that that's where the FBI got the tip that led to this week's raid.

4Chan: The anarchic /b/ message board (NSFW) on 4Chan got really steamed at LulzSec for shutting down a few gaming sites earlier this month. Its members vowed to find the culprits and track them down, but the only person they "exposed," William Davis, turned out to be a Web editor for the Bangor Daily News. We talked to him and he was a very nice guy who said he had nothing to do with LulzSec or Anonymous.

Want to add to this story? Comment below or send the author of this post, Adam Martin, an email. Have a hot tip or story idea? Let us know on the Open Wire.

via theatlanticwire.com

LulzSec’s real agenda? Who knows, but they love the Dreamcast

Posted:

17 Jun 2011 11:50 AM PDT

Well, that tears it. LulzSec, a band of hackers that has made headlines for a number of high-profile hacking incidents, are a bunch of gaming hipsters.

The hacking group has been gleefully attacking a lot of gaming networks such as online role-playing game EVE Online and indie sandbox game Minecraft. But LulzSec hackers have also avoided sabotaging certain games that have niche appeal in the gaming community -— indicating the group has some kind of agenda outside of its goal of wanton destruction on the web.

The group broke into Bethesda Softworks and could have taken information regarding 200,000 Brink players, who play an online first-person shooter game that includes parkour-style movement, but chose not to do so. That game was not rated well by critics, but has a cult following among some gamers. The group also publicly offered assistance to Sega, which was recently hit by attacks from an unknown hacking group.

“@Sega - contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down,” LulzSec said on its main Twitter account.

The Dreamcast was Sega’s last console, released ahead of the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube, and featuring advanced graphics and online play. The console ended up being the company’s swan song in the hardware industry after a spectacular run with the Sega Genesis, and Sega has since shifted to just producing games for other hardware companies like Nintendo. But there are still vibrant communities that adore the Dreamcast, and many games were so popular that Sega began porting them to the Xbox Live Arcade. That means gamers can download popular Sega Dreamcast cames like Sonic Adventure and play them on the Xbox 360.

LulzSec said it was mostly doing the hacks for fun and was enjoying unleashing havoc on the Internet. It’s similar to Anonymous, when the group didn’t take on significant political and moral causes like the hacktivist group does today. The group also said that there was a lot of information taken from the networks it had broken into that the group had not publicly released. It has released gobs of sensitive data and passwords taken from users of various sites like CIA.gov.

“This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction. There are peons and lulz lizards; trolls and victims,” the group said in an official announcement.

While the group hasn’t been shy about taunting 4chan.org and Anonymous users, it quickly backpedaled and said that it was not planning on attacking anonymous. The two groups began sparring when LulzSec initiated a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of online-centric games offline. EVE Online, League of Legends, and Minecraft all faced outages or significant latency problems. That was enough to get the attention of “/v/,” an internal image sharing board on 4chan.org that focuses on video games.

“To confirm, we aren’t going after Anonymous. 4chan isn’t Anonymous to begin with, and /b/ is certainly not the whole of 4chan. True story,” LulzSec said in its main Twitter account. “Saying we’re attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we’re going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger.”

The group said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become what the public currently acknowledges as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed.

Lulzsec previously broke into the Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.” It also said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. Members of the LulzSec group were able to break into the PBS site several days ago and post a fake story saying that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive.

Filed under: lulzsec