We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
Page 5
Within an hour, Jen had forgiven William for his strange actions. She was more intrigued with getting to know the “hacker” who had saved her from an embarrassing fate. The two began chatting about small things like Facebook and friends. Then William proposed an idea. “If you want, I could find out the name of the guy that posted your photo on 4chan,” he said.
Jen agreed. “Find the guy, and I can send you over some more pics, especially for you.”
“Who’s on your blocked list, on Facebook?” William asked.
“Six people, I think.”
William studied each of their profiles. By now, it was 6:00 a.m. Eventually, his eyes fell on the Facebook profile photo of Joshua Dean Scott, a sneering, unshaven man in a ripped denim shirt and with piercings in his eyebrow. He instantly knew this had to be the OP from 4chan.. He looked like someone thoroughly distasteful. A smiling woman with punk-shaved hair in several photos appeared to be Josh’s fiancée.
Still in his fake Kaylie account, complete with a smiling profile photo of a woman and 130 real friends, William typed Josh a message. “Hello, OP.” He clicked send.
William then sent messages to six of Josh’s Facebook friends, chosen at random, asking if anyone with an axe to grind would help him punish Josh. A close friend of Josh’s named Anthony replied. William explained what had happened on 4chan—that Josh had tried to take revenge on a girl by turning /b/ into his personal army. It turned out Anthony was a longtime 4chan user himself and was instantly appalled at Josh’s lack of etiquette on the image board.
“I’ll help you out,” Anthony said. “He shouldn’t have done that.” Anthony gave William Josh’s full name, cell phone number, and area of residence. Sometimes in social engineering, all you needed was to ask for something nicely.
William sent a few more messages to Josh, the first one posting his home address, the next his cell phone. He was signing the messages “Anon” so that Josh would think there was a group of people behind this. Soon Josh wrote back, begging for mercy.
“Please don’t hack me,” he wrote. William replied with instructions. Josh was to send a photo of himself holding a paper sign saying, “Jen owns my ass.” With his other hand, he was to hold a shoe over his head. The shoe-on-head pose was hugely symbolic on 4chan and was the ultimate admission of defeat in any kind of online argument or attack. (Do a Google Image search on “shoe on head” and see for yourself. Oddly, many people smile for the camera.) For good measure, William told Josh to send a photo of his fiancée, without clothes, holding up a sign that simply said /b/. In full belief that William, a young unemployed guy in his family home who’d been up all night, was actually a group of skilled hackers, Josh did just as he was asked. William forwarded both photos to Jen. By now it was 7:00 a.m. and the rest of his neighborhood was getting ready to go to work. William headed back up to bed.
Not everybody on /b/ did what William did, but he and plenty of others on 4chan lived for this sort of nightly experience. Despite being a young man who struggled to hold down jobs for more than a few months at a time, William, sometimes within the space of an hour, could frighten and coerce someone on the other side of the world into doing something most of us would never dream of: take off their clothes, snap a photo, and send it to a complete stranger. /b/ offered a unique sense of power and unpredictability that drew many more like him into Anonymous, and it kept them hooked. Over time, people found their own roles in the ever-shifting crowd. For the smart-mouthed Anon known as Topiary, that role was to perform.
Chapter 3
Everybody Get In Here
The raid on Aaron Barr in February 2011 would be a landmark attack for Anonymous for several reasons: It showed the collective could make a bigger impact by stealing data, not just by knocking a website offline. Once Barr’s e-mails were put online, they would have major repercussions for his reputation and that of his associates. It also showed how much more powerful an attack could be with Twitter. The process of signing into Barr’s Twitter account had been easy.
Topiary had simply tested the “kibafo33” password he’d been shown and it logged him right in. But hijacking the account and tweeting a stream of ribald humor would end up becoming a highlight of the raid for other Anons and for the press. These tweets were suddenly giving a new voice to Anonymous, showing this was not just a sinister network of hackers who wanted to attack things. They wanted to have fun, too.
Topiary had always enjoyed immersing himself in thrilling new experiences like the HBGary raid. His closely guarded real name was Jake Davis. From a young age, he had regarded the world with intense curiosity, preferring the British TV math game Countdown to cartoons. He liked numbers so much that when he turned two his mother got him a calculator, letting him gleefully punch the keys with his small fingers while she wheeled him around the grocery store. The boy developed into one of those rare individuals who was both creative and analytical, right-brained and left-brained. He loved numbers but adored music and would later be drawn to avant-garde bands and musicians, listening to them at precisely the same time as other online friends for something akin to a religious experience. Jake assigned colors to numbers: seven was orange, and six was yellow, for instance. It wasn’t a vision of color, just the sense of it, and the condition helped him plow through math as a child—remembering the color yellow as 42 made it easier to answer the multiplication sum of 6 x 7; 81 was a blue number because 9 was blue, and so on. He was certain everyone else thought this way until he realized he had a “condition” called sound-to-color synesthesia.
Born in Canterbury, England, at six he moved, with his mother, to a remote group of islands above Scotland known as the Shetlands. The move was occasioned by his grandfather Sam Davis’s impulsive purchase of a dilapidated hotel for sale on one of the islands. Someone had told the older man about the building, and he had jumped on a plane to take a look, moving with his wife, Dot, just one week later. Sam Davis was a tough, spontaneous man and a risk taker. Jake’s mother, Jennifer Davis, had lost contact with her parents for years, but when she found out by chance where they were, she decided to follow. Till then she had been shuttling her two sons between boarding houses and looking for a permanent home in southern England. Jennifer and her partner, Jake’s father, had been on and off for around six years. He was increasingly feckless and had lost himself in alcohol, rambling about finding religion and chasing other women. One day she gave both her small sons a backpack, stuffed what she could into a couple of suitcases, and took them on an eighteen-hour bus journey to Aberdeen, Scotland (the train was too expensive), before getting on a ferry to the Shetland Islands.
They lived on an island called Yell. It was the second largest of the Shetlands but still tiny, with a population of about nine hundred. It was bleak and, by some accounts, about twenty years behind the rest of the country. There was electricity, but there were no chain stores, fast-food joints, or nice restaurants. Local teenagers dabbled in drugs as a recreation of last resort. It was cold, gray, and windswept, with hardly a tree in sight. Narrow, single-lane roads sprawled across the land and tiny stone houses were sprinkled between acres of farmland.
People here were isolated. Their thick dialect was hard for newcomers to understand. Most had lived here all their lives, never venturing off the island or reading anything besides the local newspaper. Despite the farms, the island relied on crates of food and fuel ferried in once a day. When storms brewed over the horizon, residents raided the local grocery store in fear they might go hungry. Islanders didn’t associate themselves with the two countries on either side of them, Norway and the United Kingdom. Being close-knit had its advantages: people looked out for each other. The local farmers and fishermen often gave away their oversupply of meat and fish to neighbors. After a few years, Jake’s family had three refrigerators bursting with fresh lamb and huge chunks of fresh salmon so thick your fork, when poked in, wouldn’t reach the plate. But locals were mistrustful of outsiders, and school would become unbearable for Jake.
More frustrating was the shortfall in learning. Jake sensed his tiny school of a hundred students was teaching little about the world outside their island, with classes instead focusing on the particulars of sheep farming: how to tag them and how to dip them in liquid insecticide. There were compulsory knitting classes twice a week, where Jake was made to churn out colorful toys in the shapes of ghosts and dinosaurs, or hats. One of his dinosaurs won a prize at a local knitting competition, judged by the “world’s fastest knitter” who was a local hero. The feeling was bittersweet; he didn’t want to know how to knit, he wanted to learn something that could challenge him.
School and the regimen of classes started to seem increasingly pointless. When he started going to Mid Yell Junior High School, he became insolent, openly questioning the logic of teachers, only trying in classes when a teacher said he couldn’t do the work properly. He made things tolerable by doing pranks. One day he set off the school fire alarm, then heaved large pieces of furniture with a few classmates to block the entranceway for students and teachers into the main assembly hall. He didn’t want to impress the other kids. He just liked causing a stir and longed to do things no one else had done before. By the time he entered his teenage years, teachers were telling his mother that he needed to interact with a wider circle of friends. Jake to them was emotionless, cold, and sassy.
In February 2004, tragedy struck when his stepfather, Allie, was driving down one of the island’s narrow lanes, got into a car accident, and died. Jake was thirteen. To make matters worse, he and his family were told that they could not continue living in his stepfather’s home. Spence’s ex-wife still had the rights to the house and asked them to leave. Jennifer Davis and her two sons eventually were able to find government-assisted living—a small brown house with vertical wooden slats in the middle of Yell.
The experience was too much for Jake, who decided he did not want to go back to school. The best place to be was at home, by himself. He became a recluse. Amid her own grief, his mother was livid, telling her son that he couldn’t throw his education away. But he didn’t want to be restricted by schedules, a curriculum, or his own mother.
After leaving school, Jake was mostly playing video games or learning with a part-time tutor. By now, his mother had set up a dial-up Internet connection for the home so she could send and receive e-mails. Jake had convinced her to upgrade that to faster broadband, and since the age of eleven he had been going online almost every day, exploring an entirely new world of learning, socializing, then learning by socializing. When he started playing online role-playing games like RuneScape, other players would teach him tricks for getting around the Web, hiding his computer’s IP address by chatting through instant messages, and basic programming. Making online friends was easy. No one could see his amblyopia, and people valued his wit and creativity far more. He became bolder and funnier. There was an equality he had never experienced before, an ease of conversation and a sense of shared identity. When the Internet telephone service Skype came along, he used it to talk to his new friends by voice for the first time.
One day on Skype, someone suggested doing a prank call and letting everyone else listen in. Jake jumped at the opportunity. He found the number for a random Walmart outlet in the United States, then told the woman who answered that he was looking for a “fish-shaped RC helicopter.” As he begged the woman to help him find one, Jake was keenly aware that his friends (on mute) were dying of laughter. The next day he prank-called an Applebee’s restaurant in San Antonio, Texas. The manager became so incensed that he decided to prank them again, calling for an ambulance in a falsetto voice and claiming to be giving birth in the restaurant’s basement. When the restaurant threatened to called a local detective of the San Antonio Police Department, Jake and his friend called the same detective and claimed the Applebee’s manager was a terrorist. Jake’s friends couldn’t get enough of his prank calls. They were entranced by the unpredictability and the cockiness coming from his now-baritone voice. They would never have known that just a year before he was the quiet, scrawny kid getting bullied in a village school.
Soon he was doing prank calls for his friends almost every day. He found one or two other good prank callers to collaborate with, including a guy in London with whom he’d pretend to be a father and daughter arguing on an advice line. Everything was improvised, and sometimes he would think up an idea just as the phone was ringing. He pushed for ever more daring ways to upset, scare, or confuse his targets. It was like producing a television show, keeping his audience happy with new ideas and gimmicks. Eventually they moved to a website called Tiny Chat, where dozens of users could listen in on Jake’s Skype pranks.
By this time he was an occasional visitor to 4chan and /b/, attracted mainly by the pranks and raids. He noticed he could grab more listeners if he advertised through 4chan. He would start a thread on /b/ and paste in links to the chat room where he was broadcasting his prank call, encouraging more people to join in and listen to something funny. Soon enough he was carrying out live prank calls to 250 listeners at a time. The San Antonio Applebee’s became his favorite victim. Throughout the course of a year he ordered them rounds of twenty pizzas at a time and thousands of free boxes from UPS. On another occasion he got a tip-off (through 4chan) from a disgruntled employee at a home furnishings store in the United States. The employee had slipped him the phone-in code to access the store’s speaker system. When he called it, he put on an authoritative American accent and told the customers that all items were free for the next twenty minutes. When he called back a few minutes later, the sound coming from the background could only be described as chaos.
Two years in and fourteen-year-old Jake was flitting between his broadcasted prank calls and raids by 4chan’s /b/tards. Successful raids could target just about anything online, but they tended to have one thing in common, something that has barely changed to this day: a surge. Whether it was the mass spamming of shock-photos on someone’s forum, or overwhelming a website with traffic, or warping the votes for Time magazine’s Person of the Year or a website’s favorite video game character, raids by /b/ involved pooling together and flooding something else to the point of embarrassment. It was strength in numbers. The more people there were, the bigger the deluge.
4chan’s first landmark raid is widely considered to have been against Habbo Hotel on July 12, 2006. Habbo was a popular game and real-time chatting site designed as a virtual hangout for teens. Once logged into the site, you could get a bird’s-eye view of various rooms in the hotel, and in the form of a character you had created, you could explore and chat with other people’s avatars.
One day, someone on 4chan suggested disrupting the virtual environment by joining en masse and flooding it with the same character, a black man in a gray suit and Afro hairstyle. The men with the Afro then had to block the entrance to the pool and tell other avatars it was “closed due to fail and AIDS.” When regular Habbo users logged in, they suddenly found the area heaving with what looked like sharply dressed disco dancers. /b/ reveled in the Great Habbo Raid of ’06, and the “pool’s closed” meme was born. For the next few years on July 12, groups of 4chan users returned to the Habbo Hotel with their Afro-wearing avatars, sometimes moving their characters to create s
wastikalike formations in the hotel.
By the time he was sixteen and had been out of school for three years, Jake wasn’t just taking part in 4chan raids, he was organizing them. In 2008 he helped instigate Operation Basement Dad. News had broken that spring that Austrian engineer Josef Fritzl had raped and imprisoned his forty-five-year-old daughter for the last twenty-four years, fathering seven of her children. Details of Fritzl’s monstrous crimes shocked the world, and his trial was in the news for weeks. Naturally, 4chan saw the funny side. Jake and several other 4chan users met in a separate chat room and decided to create a fake Twitter feed for Fritzl. Their goal was for @basementdad to become the first Twitter account to reach one million followers, a race then being fought between actor Ashton Kutcher and CNN. Less than twenty-four hours after they had set up the account and announced it on 4chan, media-sharing site eBaum’s World, and other sites, the account had nearly three hundred thousand followers. Nearly half a million ended up following @basementdad before Twitter shut it down; according to Jake’s calculations, it was on track to win the race.
Pranks like this couldn’t be organized easily on 4chan. There were now millions of people using its forums, and up to two hundred thousand posts going up each day on /b/. The discussion threads changed so quickly it was impossible to have a cogent discussion. Eventually, people realized that to organize a good raid they needed Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
IRC was a simple, real-time chat system created in 1988 by a programmer named Jarkko “WiZ” Oikarinen. (He now works for Google in Sweden.) By 2008, a few million people were using it—you didn’t need an account, as you might with MSN or AOL Instant Messenger. You just needed a program, or IRC “client,” that could point you to the wide variety of networks on offer. There are hundreds of IRC networks out there today, some aligned with various organizations like WikiLeaks. EFnet is one of the oldest, and beloved by veteran hackers like Sabu. Once you were on a network there could be dozens, even hundreds of chat rooms or more to visit, known as “channels.” Some channels had one person, some had thousands. Most had between five and twenty-five people. You would simply enter and start meeting people.