Slashdot Mirror
Authorities Closing On LulzSec
mask.of.sanity writes "The noose is tightening on hacker group LulzSec, according to a coordinated group of like-minded users, some from LulzSec-Exposed that claim to have uncovered the identity of LulzSec members and supplied them to the FBI. An arrest Monday of a UK teenager was rumoured to be former hacker scene member Ryan Clearly, and the trackers, which includes a former FBI agent, say this arrest is the first of many. They refused to disclose the identities of LulzSec chief, saying it would cause the members to burn the evidence of attacks and scatter."
But publishing a news story about the arrests isn't going to cause the members to destroy evidence and scatter? Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.... Fuck.
Do it, do it now, they are on to you. No really, it's not just what they want you to think, they really mean it, your time is up, go to ground and never resurface again. Someone within your own organisation has outed you to the Feds, you can't trust any of them, scatter and break all contact with all your members, as any one of them could be the informant. They will get you if you remain organised.
Really, the FBI isn't afraid that capturing one alleged member of LulzSec won't cause the other members to bolt and hide the evidence, but disclosing the names will?
It's days like these I think elementary logic classes should be manditory.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
There's a group of Japanese hackers who've been able to shut down businesses, infect users with rootkits and remotely remove functionality from consumer electronics.
They call themselves SONY or something...
This is unfortunate considering what lulzsec is currently doing for the IT job market. These attacks are getting incompetent people fired and making companies go out and look for competent people to hire in their place. Also, it is forcing them to actually invest money in their IT infrastructure instead of just slapping some servers together and letting some clowns straight out of a degree mill run them. People need to realize that this is a net good thing because if a 19 year old with no formal education is ripping servers owned by multi-billion dollar international corporations then the Chinese have already been there. A company would not even know about the Chinese intrusion much less publicize it once they found out so what lulzsec is doing is shining the light on how poorly these companies that hold your data are run.
What is all this media attention on LulzSec, it is kinda amusing. The character assassination of Ryan Clearly in the UK news is crazy. They have interviewed people in his road, called him a shut in and other things, I think i heard terrorist today as well. I have even had 2 family memebers call me up to disscuss lulzSec (my 60 year old mother), this whole story is dominating the news WHY? I have not seen rapists get this kind of media attention and character assassination. The fun thing is, Ryans Role is pretty clear, he was the IRC server host. That's it, so by extension the FBI and UK believe he is now part of Lulzsec. Well Ryan provided a medium for anyone to chat on his IRC server, Its like saying because Google link to the lulzsec page they too are in league with them. Just because someone supply's a medium and someone abuses it, it is not the fault of that person.
This is a massive PR thing and I wonder if LulzSec is government funded. Is it not strange that other hacking groups have been on the slow raise, now a Super hacking group has appeared to create waves just as the government wants to lock down the internet, LulzSec is now running operations with AnonOps maybe this is just one big government honey pot to pull the last reminding old school hackers and take them out in one go while also locking down the internet because of the evil goldstein sorry I mean LulzSec and their abuse of power.
tl:dr Ryan Clearly = IRC host and ScapeGoat, LulzSec could be the new goldstein (might be government placed to get access to other hacking groups), Governments are going to win whatever the outcome, Internet gets locked down and OR the hackers go to jail.
SIDE NOTE (YES I AM SHOUTING)
WHY ARE GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS WITH SENSITIVE DATA EVEN ON THE INTERNET? STOP USING THE PUBLIC NETWORK THAT WAS DESIGNED FOR SHARING INFORMATION AND ATTEMPT TO LIMIT IT TO CREATE YOUR OWN INTERNET> SERIOUSLY GET A PRIVATE NETWORK AND AMERICA STOP TRYING TO CONTROL IT.
It's been obvious from the beginning that Lulzsec might be fickle in their targeting like anons, but that they are a coordinated group. That lends them a bit more power, but also means that despite their bravado they are connected. And since they're not thinking like terrorists, I doubt they have formed "cells" like any organization which doesn't want to fall quickly to a coordinated assault.
Maybe I don't give them enough credit and the IRC operator was careful to shield everyone and knows no one by name. But despite the publicity, and the fact that they have more skill than I, somehow I doubt they are true black hat masters. Braggarts are the most likely criminals to land in jail.
Are you suggesting that these people are incapable of mistakes, and cannot ever possibly be outsmarted by feds?
I believe you're vastly overestimating these guys, and similarly underestimating authorities.
Ryan Clearly housed a lulz IRC chatroom. He has nothing to do with lulzsec.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
I'm suggesting that when you've been thinking about such things long enough there's very little room to make mistakes, and that if you have, you'll tend to know about it. The hacker mindset is one of meticulous attention to detail and obsessive thought about a subject on their mind, you can guarantee that particularly when paranoid about being caught which is going to be more the case with such announcements as this that the scope for mistakes will be so small, and the scope for mistakes that can't be cleaned up after the fact and before discovery is even smaller.
I'm not saying they couldn't be outsmarted by the feds, simply that they wont be outsmarted by someone foolish enough to post on the internet "We know the leader's identity", before he's actually been brought to justice. I also suspect that to actually catch them they're likely to somewhat cheat, and throw due process out the window- they may have a rough idea who is involved but not have the evidence to legitimately question them or seize their kit, so they'll make up some false charge to seize it and build up evidence upon that anyway. They may not even have a case then but the authorities including the judiciary seem quite competent at ruling against people even when the evidence is unacceptably weak in the first place.
They probably will get them some way or another, but it may not be through a legitimate thoroughly proper and clean legal process. Sure many such hackers have been caught in the end, but how many haven't over the years? How many spammers go untouched, how many criminal hackers do the authorities not even know the rought whereabouts of? how many DDOS attacks against major corporations even before anonymous started doing them went unpunished? you only have to look at the rather famous case of Al Capone, where physical evidence should theoretically have been much easier to come by and see that they had to do him on tax evasion in the end to see that sometimes, achieving proper justice against criminals can be quite the impossible task. The result then is either failure to deal with them at all, or a bending of the law.
I think more realistically you're underestimating the ability of smart criminals, particularly in the digital world to evade justice. For all the feel good stories about "criminal X has been caught" hammered into us on the news, and newspapers, there's plenty more who are not. It's perfectly possible they will fall into this category, and it seems blurting out to the world that you know the identities of these people even if you don't announce said identity is only going to make life that much harder for the authorities who may truly find any potential evidence has already been burnt and shredded already whether in the physical or digital sense. A smart investigation would simply not announce knowledge of the identity of the target until they were already in custody, anything else is just foolish penis waving.
What is it with Americans, Chinese, and the fucking Dalai Lama. It's like you only have room for a single thing in your heads. Get the fuck over it, Tibet was 50 years ago. Otherwise you have a shitload of occupied land you should be giving back to Mexico, not to mention a few other countries having "the shit freed out of them" by American occupation at present. To the victor the spoils, and it ends there. Otherwise you turn into a fucking arab and 1000 years from now you're still arguing about shit that is no longer relevant.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
DRAMATICA, Wackyleeks, Wednesday (textfiles.com) — The noose is tightening on LulzSec, oh yes it is, with a red-handed capture nearly almost imminent, said FBI Media Liaison today, and don't you worry about that.
The drug-running terrorist paedophile probably-Chinese-government members of LulzSec have used their horrifying and "l33t" "Internet Relay Chat" skills (or "sk1llz0r," as "hackers" call them) to break into some of the most complicatedly protected computery gadget devices on the Inter-web-thing, particularly the ones running Microsoft Windows. Just like your computer does!!
"Fortunately," fed an off-the-record FBI source, "we have tracked down these dastardly fiends to their festering basement lairs, where they sit all day exchanging BitCoins via their 'four-channel' systems. Our agents are poised right now to swoop, swoop! upon these avatars of delinquency! Multiple US agencies are involved. They might be right outside!"
Authorities worry the "hackers" will get wind of the raids and scatter and burn the evidence. Repeat, the authorities don't want the group to scatter and burn the evidence. Just so that's clear with everyone.
LulzSec was formed by a group of Scientologists interested in Guy Fawkes. The group is named after "lulls," which is when the four-channel system goes quiet, and "sex," the availability of which would cause the group's immediate collapse.
Picture: Practice safe computing!
http://rocknerd.co.uk
You're not incompetent if you want a community where you can keep your door unlocked, but yes, you are incompetent if you keep your door unlocked in the real world and expect it to adjust to your romanticised version of how things should be. We'd all love to live in a world where security isn't necessary, but we don't. Anyone who doesn't secure the data of other people that they have been entrusted with, and in many cases who are paying customers, to at least an agreed minimum standard, should be held criminally liable - and if they use the excuse that they were helping to create a free and open internet by allowing anyone to pry on customer data, they should be certified insane. By the way, you're confusing an open internet with an insecure internet (just because people want to be able to share data and content with open formats, doesn't follow that they don't want to be able to protect their bank accounts), but that's another matter entirely.
Just because you're young and stupid doesn't mean you don't have to deal with the consequences of being stupid. Sure kids do stupid things. I did, I'm sure we all did. That doesn't mean kids immune from the responsibilities of their actions. They are given more leeway, certainly, for having poorly developed sense of judgement, and because of that in this situation you have to take into account that kids are liars and could be falsely claiming responsibility for street cred. But then you look at circumstance:
If some 8-year-old kid who just got his first laptop 3 months ago says on his facebook page that he hacked the FBI, maybe that claim is not trustworthy. But if it is a 17-year old who has been into computers since he was 8 bragging about the same thing, using the lingo, demonstrating the knowledge, etc... maybe you believe him. Or at least you treat it as a credible possibility and investigate. Perhaps even prosecute if you have enough evidence. Maybe he really didn't do it, but then he's going to have to deal with the consequences of saying he did so because he certainly seems like he could have done it.
If you try and convince somebody that you committed a crime, and you do a convincing enough job that they believe you, that's your fault. You better damn well believe that authorities care about high profile felonies, especially ones that are targeted at THEM, which if I recall, some of these attacks were.
Here's a slashdot analogy for you. I was taught not to poke a bees nest when I was a kid. Weren't you? What we're talking about here isn't just poking the bees nest (which the lulzsec guys did), we're talking about somebody else who walked over to the now-angry nest of bees, picked up the stick that was used to poke the nest and stood there under the nest holding the stick. Look, even most kids aren't stupid enough to do that... and the ones who are, what do you make of that? Do you blame the bees for stinging them? He chose to stand there with the stick!
with your logic, you can convict a 6 year old who says 'dodo' during a national anthem.
What in the world does that have to do with our discussion of publicly confessing to felonies?
No, it's not insurgency. Please do not compare those stupid loserboys to people who actually risk their lives doing practical stuff. There is no popular support for those clowns, who will be branded as data thieves and criminals. Once the authorities get one of them, he'll spill everything because they don't have the guts to resist interrogation. One hard stare from a cop and they'll crap their pants.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.