"Political Alliance" Between Anonymous and LulzSec

[Marechal Ney]

The title says right.

Comic book fan? This is kind of like that time Magneto teamed up with Apocalypse, and the two dudes wreaked a lot of havoc on the world. Over the weekend, LulzSec, a relatively new group of Internet pranksters, announced it would join Anonymous – a much more established, if still loosely affiliated, organization of hackers – to wage war on government sites, under the auspices of an initiative called "Operation Anti-Security."

"We encourage any vessel, large or small, to open fire on any government or agency that crosses their path," reads a LulzSec statement. "We fully endorse the flaunting of the word 'AntiSec' on any government website defacement or physical graffiti art. We encourage you to spread the word of AntiSec far and wide, for it will be remembered. To increase efforts, we are now teaming up with the Anonymous collective and all affiliated battleships."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/...al-destruction

This is getting partially worriesome. The new wave of Hacktivism is indiscriminately Anarchist. While I think its good that they are putting a check on government corruption, this could get insane. Now, the two most powerful Hacktivist groups on the net, one well known but recently quiet, one mysterious, skilled, and making headlines in the past couple weeks, could pose a serious threat to government cyber installations. I used to think that, for instance, Anonymous's DDOS attacks on monetary websites that refused to process transactions with WikiLeaks resulted in numerous arrests, and that such a kind of aggressive, widespread hacking was infeasible. But now, LulzSec has come out and compromised the security so many corporations, and even DDOSd the CIA...things could get very, very interesting. This is now an international security matter worthy of being discussed in the Mudpit.

LulzSec, with their commitment to total anarchy, has posted hundreds of thousands of emails/accounts and their passwords on their website, which I will not post the address to as I believe it may be against forum rules to do so, but it is pretty easy to find with a google search (HINT: Its the most obvious name of a website for a group called Lulz Security...).

Thoughts?

[the_mango55]

DDoS attacks against government sites will just convince them to greatly expand server capacity on the taxpayer's dollar.

So therefore, I'm against it.

[Cooraan]

D-bags the lot of them.

[James the Red]

I dont know, By announcing that they are teaming up with anonymous, that can backfire and encourage members of anonymous to go after lulzSec, hack their sites, or make fun of them, or spam their forums with Gay Yiff porn or something.



Lulzsec is an organization.

Anonymous is chaotic lulz.

[Pyrich]

What happens if the majority of anons decide instead to help root out the anarchist?

[removeduser_487563287433]

Use of the word "political" does not make it political.

[Carpathian Wolf]

Anarchists doing actions that will contribute to greater government control of the internet...idiots.

[eddy_purpus]

Anarchists doing actions that will contribute to greater government control of the internet...idiots.

I wanna believe that the lulzec hackers are civilians...
But there is something very wrong with all of this events ...

It just makes me believe that lulzsec is founded by the government so that they can put stricter internet laws by the actions of lulzsec....

It is just toooooooooooooo staged...

[Prodigal]

Anarchists doing actions that will contribute to greater government control of the internet...idiots.

+1

[mrmouth]

This aren't overwhelming attacks on highly secure (subjective) government sites. They look for holes and exploit them. Really just a bunch of petulant children that have taken control of a group that likely had more reigned in aspirations.

And the media doesn't help with it's reporting on these attacks, like the one recently on the CIA web page. They very much made it sound like they had actually hacked into the CIA.

[justicar5]

This aren't overwhelming attacks on highly secure (subjective) government sites. They look for holes and exploit them. Really just a bunch of petulant children that have taken control of a group that likely had more reigned in aspirations.

And the media doesn't help with it's reporting on these attacks, like the one recently on the CIA web page. They very much made it sound like they had actually hacked into the CIA.

DDoS apparently aren't that hard to setup it's true, and they have apparently failed to actually hack some of their targets, so it looks like a few people with a clue and alot of script kiddies making up the bot-net.

[Simon Cashmere]

This aren't overwhelming attacks on highly secure (subjective) government sites. They look for holes and exploit them. Really just a bunch of petulant children that have taken control of a group that likely had more reigned in aspirations.

And the media doesn't help with it's reporting on these attacks, like the one recently on the CIA web page. They very much made it sound like they had actually hacked into the CIA.

I've seen some of the things they've done on their own website, and its not that impressive. The placeholder pages of the Senate, that present to the public, getting into that and listing the directories is no big deal. It shouldn't happen, but, it's not like they are into the secrets of the US Senate. It's a little like putting graffiti on the capital building at night.

They seem to have compromised some email passwords, but this is because, many websites require that you use an email as your username. If the website is insecure, they then have your email, and a password that may match other accounts as well.

When I was maybe 10-15 years old, I thought that this sort of thing was amusing, but some of these guys are in their 30s! If these guys wanted to, they could set up all sorts of internet security businesses and have money, legitimacy, etc - this is a dumb way to achieve success.

[boofhead]

I'm not worried.

[Jedi1]

An up side IS it will encourage governments to get in gear with their internet security, a down side is it will encourage governments to become more intrusively involved in the internet.

[Doge Domenico]

Anonymous freaking owns the internet. Lulzsec is going to be absorbed in just three weeks.

[Simon Cashmere]

The people in LULZSEC have been progressively outed by some people calling themselves the Teen Web Ninjas. Might be behind 7 proxies, but someone has your number...

http://lulzsecexposed.blogspot.com/

I also read an interesting article about a small web startup that was being extorted by Lulzsec. Pitiful there are people around like that.

http://www.unveillance.com/latest-ne...ial-statement/

Here are the chatlogs.

Or Karim's version of them, here's what LULZSEC had to say:

http://pastebin.com/AjVd0L9E

[Armenum]

I have a feeling this whole "hacking movement" is not going to end well. Once they cross the line to many times, we may seem more punitive measures taken by appropriate bodies. Of course, on the other hand, tracking these people is rather difficult...

[Captain Jin]

Seems silly to me. If they start causing more problems they are only going to paint a bigger bulls eye on their backs.

[Phoenix Rising]

I agree Marechal that the matter is getting out of hand. Whilst the CIA attack was only their public website and not their inteligence databases, it is still a direct assault against the US Government, and that is going to have some serious ramifications. However, it would appear that Lulz are strictly vandals and not politically motivated; the CIA attack was light-hearted and clearly they lack the nerve or the ability to have hacked into the hard stuff, seemingly content to keep taking down video game developers. To this end, we can likely indentify them as nothing more than attention-seekers, and as soon as the press gets bored of Lulzec, they should get bored and die down.

Personally, I think one of the most critical matters on this topic is the level of confusion and disinformation. Every source I look at, be it media or just off the internet, is disputed over it's credibility. Alas, Anonymous's greatest strength; the fact that they are 'anonymous', is also their greatest weakness, as LulzSec or even the Government can stage fake Anonymous attacks that are anarchist in nature (i.e. PlayStation), and thereby reduce Anonymous's popular support.

I make no claim to having any kind of expertise of the subject, but I do have a few links in the fringes of the hacker community. From what I know, hackers are divided into two groups; Black Hats (Anarchist Criminals) and White Hats ('Hacktivists'). Anon is the latter, whilst Lulzec appears to be the former. Anon has identified itself as being something of a moral crusader, having often assisted the authorities in the aprehension of criminals such as paedophiles. Under this context, they probably loathe Lulzec, and personally I can't see them forging any kind of alliance. The reports in the media suggesting this could be a propoganda attempt by the government to get public perception to fuse LulzSec and Anon together, so that no one will sympathise with anti-US Anonymous.

Edit: Anon's aggression towards the US lately is, I think, indisputably related to Wikileaks. Over the last nine months, there have been lots of reports about authorities making large arrests on hackers suspected of being part of Anonymous, and Anon's lack of activity since then suggests that the purge was succsesful, and any remaining Anons have gone to ground.

Thoughts on this?

[Veliky Kaiser Theos]

They aren't "hacktivists", they're a bunch of absolute (insert your derogatory name here)'s who should not be paraded as heroes by the feeble minded psuedo-anarchists who wish to stand out. They don't want to help improve security, they're only after a cheap thrill, like binge drinkers and street-racers.