Here's something for you to think about: Was the arrest last week of the five LulzSec members just part of an intermediate stop gap in the pursuit of a far more prominent fugitive, namely Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks?
Jeremy Hammond, one of the five hackers arrested two days ago in the crackdown on key members of LulzSec and Anonymous, is no stranger to the law and has been described by his mother as "genius with no brain".
Court documents released earlier this week show that the 27-year-old Chicago native was arrested several times over the past few years for hacking activities, protests, mob action and other charges. The picture that emerges of Hammond is of an individual committed to a variety of activist causes with little concern about their potential consequences.
At the large public housing project in New York City where he lived, outsiders knew him as a quiet family man. But federal prosecutors say Hector Xavier Monsegur was an internet saboteur known as Sabu.
During the Arab spring, prosecutors say he hacked into government websites in Tunisia, Yemen and Algeria. He helped coordinate attacks on credit card companies after they refused to accept donations to Wikileaks. Then, they said, he added another layer to the subterfuge by informing on his accomplices after he was caught by the FBI last spring.
The trail to the New York apartment where a hacker named "Sabu" of LulzSec and Anonymous fame was arrested last June can be traced back to a former Anonymous participant who turned against the group over its WikiLeaks activities.
Sabu, whose name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, pleaded guilty to computer hacking charges in August and spent the last six months working as an informant for the FBI. The undercover operation led to hacking-related charges being filed against four alleged cohorts in the U.K., Ireland, and Chicago yesterday.
According to the FBI, you're looking at Sabu, the head of LulzSec, and the de facto King of Anonymous—easily the most notorious and influential hacker alive today. One thing: he just turned in his people to the police.
Infamous hacking group LulzSec may have sealed its fate after logging into its website using a router based in Britain, where alleged member Ryan Cleary would later be arrested.
The group signed up for a free account with CloudFlare, a service that optimises the speed of websites and mitigates attacks levelled against them. The sign-up occurred within hours of a hack of US news service PBS, where LulzSec posted a fake story.
The notorious LulzSec announced the existence of LulzSecurity.com in a simple tweet on June 2, 2011. Within minutes that website was taken down by other hackers. However, less than an hour later LulzSec was back, and this time the site stayed up, at least until its announced "retirement" about three weeks later. What changed during that hour?
These days if you are a hardened political revolutionary, you’re just as likely to be a computer geek as someone who gets shoved around by cops at a street protest.
That’s largely thanks to the rise of Anonymous, a brand of hacktivism that has also taken Brazil by storm over the last year.
In secretive online chat rooms, away from the glare of police, small groups of elite hackers plot attacks against multi-national corporations and governments.
But in a quest to expose what they see as a conspiracy of high-level corruption, the hackers – affiliated to cyber-activist network Anonymous – have in recent months expanded their targets, becoming increasingly unpredictable and callous in the process.
Anonymous, move over. WikiLeaks, take a hike. There's a new uber hacking/whistleblowing group in town with some serious game and a wicked cool name that's putting you both to shame.
The Lords of Dharmaraja is the group behind the theft of Symantec's Norton AntiVirus source code from India's intelligence agencies. It's also the group that claims to have broken into the servers of India's embassy in Paris last summer. Now it's released a bombshell memo that appears to document collusion between the world's largest makers of smartphones and India's spy services.
