LulzSec

Anonymous and LulzSec has PayPal in its crosshairs but this time it's using a legal strategy to battle the online payment processor.

The protest is in response to the 14 arrests that were made in connection with the DDoS attack against PayPal, specifically the arrest of Mercedes Renee Haefer, a journalism student at the university of Las Vegas who faces up to 15 years in prison and up to $500K in fines for allegedly participating in the attack. From the official press release:

A joint statement issued by Anonymous and LulzSec has just been released on Pastebin:

Hello thar FBI and international law authorities,

We recently stumbled across the following article with amazement and a certain amount of amusement:

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/20/138555799/fbi-arrests-alleged-anonymous-h…

The 14 people arrested Tuesday in a crackdown on the Anonymous hacking group are not suspected of having links to criminal gangs, terrorist networks or foreign governments. They are alleged only to have participated in attacks on PayPal's website, after that company cut off payments to WikiLeaks.

But the FBI was determined to go after them anyway.

Computer crime authorities will be hoping that they have struck a significant blow against the Anonymous and LulzSec hacking groups, following a series of raids and arrests on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the United States, 16 people have been arrested in connection with an internet attack last year against PayPal - an assault which was claimed by the loosely-knit hacktivist group known as "Anonymous", in retaliation for the website withdrawing support for WikiLeaks.

Well, seems like LulzSec has returned, and moved beyond the DDOS attack! Not content to merely shut down one of Rupert Murdoch's paper's websites, the hacking group has instead planted a bizarro-Onionesque account of the mogul's death-by-palladium on a Times redesign page masquerading as The Sun. Well played, #AntiSec.

Its audacity was brazen and apparently fearless. Among its high-profile victims were Sony, the CIA, the FBI, the US Senate and even the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency. Exposing frailties in government and corporate networks, the group leaked hundreds of thousands of hacked passwords, and in the process garnered more than a quarter of a million followers on Twitter. But after just 50 days, on 25 June, LulzSec suddenly said it was disbanding.

Teams of hackers are still digging up and releasing information about LulzSec members in an attempt to get them arrested. The latest "dox" was dumped earlier this week by TeaMp0isoN and contains information about five individuals believed to have been involved with the defunct hacking outfit.

LulzSec disbanded at the end of June after 50 days of hacking and DDoSing corporate and governmental websites. Their attacks were regularly accompanied by leaks of sensitive information that put innocent users at risk.

The hacking group Lulz Security ended its 50-day reign of terror this weekend, but law enforcement's hunt for its members will go on. Last week, FBI agents raided an Iowa woman's home because of her connections to the group.

At about 11 am last Thursday, 29-year-old Laurelai Bailey heard a knock at her Davenport, Iowa home. She found around eight FBI agents swarming at her doorstep, search warrant in hand. But the agents politely "told me they weren't there to arrest me," Bailey tells us in an interview.

A British teenager charged with attacking websites as part of the international hacking group Lulz Security was released by a court on bail yesterday after being diagnosed with autism.

Ryan Cleary, 19, was arrested one week ago and charged two days later with offences including hacking into the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), the British equivalent of the FBI.

Anonymous has issued a beginner's guide to hacking online under the title, School4Lulz.

With the disbandment of hacker group LulzSec, the online 'hacktivist' collective is clearly looking for buddies to continue its fight under the banner Operation InfoSec - and one way of recruiting fellow travellers, it seems, is to issue them with a Hacking 101.