With equal parts curiosity and amusement, I’ve been following the antics of Lulz Security — LulzSec for short — the Internet’s hot new comedic hacking troupe, as they’ve wreaked havoc on the web in recent weeks. Billing themselves as “a team of entertainment and security experts that specialise in the production of malicious comedic cybermaterials” on their website — which plays the themesong to “The Love Boat” when you visit it — the dastardly hackers have been f*cking mainly with giant corporations like Sony, Citigroup and Fox, mixing in some shenanigans with PBS along the way. But suddenly they’re on a rampage.
In recently days they’ve — the group’s mascot, “Pierre Dubois,” is depicted above — opened a telephone hotline to take hacking requests, released a trove of 62,000 seemingly random email address and passwords, really gone the extra mile to shake the hornets nest by hacking the CIA’s website yesterday afternoon just to impress a Twitter user and, just for good measure, they’re also doing some pretty righteous taunting on Twitter of other corners of the web known for causing trouble, 4Chan’s /b/ and Anonymous.
WHO THE HELL ARE THESE RAPSCALLIONS?
That’s the question many people are probably asking right now — along with “Why?” — and theories abound. But one really interesting, albeit highly conspiratorial, theory really caught my attention.
Writes David Neal:
Fun seems to be the motive behind the group’s actions, but that does not mean that it has not created enemies, including some of the infamous 4chan forum members and the even more scary CIA.
That doesn’t seem to bother it though. “Lulz Security, where the entertainment is always at your expense, whether you realize it or not”, reads one of its tweets, “Wrecking your infrastructures since 2011.”
Some here at The INQUIRER strongly suspect that Lulzsec is actually a US government sponsored false flag nuisance hacking operation that’s meant to stampede lawmakers into granting ever more draconian surveillance and control powers over the internet to the emerging US police state.
Look, I’m not usually one who buys into conspiracy theories, but this seems to make a lot of of sense. The reckless manner in which LulzSec is operating sort of gives me the feeling that they’re acting like a group with immunity — one that’s free from worry of a prosecutorial hammer being dropped on them. Just a thought.
And this morning, LulzSec got the Taiwanese animation treatment, signaling that they’ve truly “made it.” Congrats guys, whoever you are!