We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

by Parmy Olson

  When someone like Jake first started using IRC, it was more than just a casual chat room. IRC was geared toward technically minded people, thanks to its long list of special commands that let you navigate channels, even manipulate the network. The command /whois, for instance, showed you what channels another person was in and an IP address. Starting a private chat would look like this: “msg topiary Hey, how are you?” Depending upon which client you were using, each channel would have a list on one side showing the room’s participants, ranked by those who had “operator” status, or the power to kick people out if they were talking IN ALL CAPS or generally being annoying. IRC lingo was littered with abbreviations like rofl (rolling on the floor laughing), lol (laugh out loud), and ttyl (talk to you later). Like 4chan, it gradually developed its own culture and language.

  Once you were on a network, anyone could create a new IRC channel. You simply typed /join #channelname, and it would appear. If Jake wanted to organize a new raid like Operation Basement Dad, he would create a room—for example, #opbasementdad—and invite a chosen few to enter. That way, anyone interested could contribute ideas and help plan the raid or stunt.

  Once the planners had figured out what to do, they would go back to 4chan. This time, though, they would use /b/ as a recruiting tool, creating a new thread and spamming it with this message: “EVERYONE GET IN HERE.” They’d also paste a link next to the message that took other /b/ users into their new IRC channel. Soon there could be scores, even a few hundred people joining the chat room and listening to instructions or throwing out ideas. Anonymous had first emerged on image boards like 4chan, but it was evolving through Internet Relay Chat networks. It was becoming more organized. Although people could use nicknames on IRC, by and large they were maintaining the anonymity encouraged on the image boards. Individual personalities could emerge, but people still had no real-world identities.

  IRC networks were helping Anonymous turn from an unpredictable, volatile mass of image board users into well-organized, sometimes-threatening groups. If the raid was interesting enough, or well-publicized enough, more people would join. Things went up another notch once hackers started to jump in. The more people joined an IRC channel, the higher the likelihood that among them would be individuals with particularly strong technical talents: programmers and hackers who could breach a network or write a script to help automate an attack. One of those hackers was Kayla.

  Chapter 4

  Kayla and the Rise of Anonymous

  While Topiary was making the /b/tards laugh on 4chan, the Internet entity known as Kayla was teaching herself to rip holes in cyberspace. Her journey into the world of Anonymous, as she told it, had started off with isolation, the discovery of hackers on the Internet, and then finding her place in the rise of hacktivism. But there was one thing many people came to learn about Kayla. She lied.

  It was not done in a malicious way. Kayla lied partly to protect herself, partly to stay friendly. Being evasive about information, like the hacker known as Tflow, could be off-putting even when people knew that this was Anonymous etiquette. Instead of refusing to answer a personal question or join in conversations, Kayla freely provided personal details about her life to her online friends, humdrum accounts of stubbing her toe on the door on the way downstairs to get some food or going to the beach with her real-life friends. She shared unusually stark details about her childhood and parents and about other hacks that she had carried out in the past. Whether she was lying about some, none, or all of it, the person behind Kayla seemed to have a deep need to tell stories to prove her value to others.

  After the February 2011 attack on HBGary Federal, for instance, Kayla corroborated the story Sabu had told, that a sixteen-year-old girl had hacked into Greg Hoglund’s website, rootkit.com. “After resetting Greg’s account, I used it to social-​engineer Jussi for access to rootkit.com,” Kayla said in an interview in March 2011. “It was the icing on the cake.” In truth, Sabu had been the hacker to social-engineer the admin and hack the site.

  When she was asked to recount the story a few months later, her version changed: “The thing is, the way it all happened…​Sabu set the ball rolling with the social engineering, then I finished it off by nuking rootkit.com’s server.” Kayla did not have to lie about her exploits. She was a skilled hacker and most people who knew her accepted that. But she also didn’t want to corrupt Sabu’s lie and make things difficult for her friend. That was Kayla—lying so that she didn’t have to upset people.

  Kayla claimed that, along with being a sixteen-year-old girl, her parents had split when she was eleven. The story went that her father had been the more stable parent and taken custody, then moved with her to a remote town where there were few kids Kayla’s age nearby. With little else to do, she started chatting with her old friends on MSN Messenger, logging in with her real name (which she said was also “Kayla”) and other credentials. Her father, she said, was a software engineer who worked from home, and the house was littered with books on computer programming, Linux Kernel, Intel, and networking. She started reading his books and asking him questions about what he did. Encouraged by her enthusiasm, he sat with her in front of a computer and showed her how to find bugs in C source code and exploit them, then how to bypass them. Soon she was immersing herself in scripting languages like Perl, Python, and PHP, learning how to attack Web databases with the SQL injection method. It was mostly harmless, but by the time she was fourteen, Kayla claimed she was writing scripts that could automate cyber attacks.

  It had all been harmless, “until I went looking for so-called hacking forums,” Kayla said. “I registered at some of them and they were all, ‘Go away little girl this isn’t for you.’ Fair enough I was only 14 but it made me so angry!”

  Using some of the skills she had picked up from her dad and online research, she claimed she hacked into one forum site and deleted much of its contents using SQL injection. It was an attack unlike any the regulars had seen before.

  “Wow you’re only 14 and you can do this?” Kayla recalled one of the hackers there saying. He invited Kayla into the more exclusive chat channels on EFnet, one of the oldest Internet Relay Chat networks. The forum user saw potential in Kayla, gave her tips, and pushed her to read more books on programming so she could learn more.

  “It got kinda weird because I started meeting some shady people,” she said, referring to purely online meetings. “One guy was much older than me, like a lot older and had a weird crush on me. I guess a girl hacker is every guy hacker’s dream? Maybe? The only thing was he was 27 and I was only 14, so yeah, weird! I’m so sick of people thinking only old people are smart, and just because I’m young anything I say doesn’t count?”

  Though Kayla insisted that online life was hard because she was female, the opposite was more likely true. The real person behind her nickname was guaranteed to get more attention and more opportunities to hack others by being a friendly and mysterious girl. Females were a rare sight on image boards and hacking forums; hence the online catchphrase “There are no girls on the Internet,” and why posing as a girl has been a popular tactic for Internet trolls for years. But this didn’t spell an upper hand for genuine females. If they revealed their sex on an image board like /b/ they were often met with misogynistic comments like “Tits or GTFO”—that is, “Show your tits or get the fuck out.” Many girls on image boards would often appease these calls by going down the route of becoming “camwhores,” stripping or performing sexual acts on webcam for attention and acceptance. The other option was to simply hide their sex and be male online. With so much ego and reputation at stake, identifying someone’s gender on a board like /b/ could be almost impossible, but it made sense to be suspicious of those claiming outright to be young women. This was why number 29 of the Rules of the Internet said that on the Internet “all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents.” Kayla probably wasn’t an FBI agent, but certainly someone with an elaborate backstory, and one that perhaps hinted at who she real
ly was in real life.

  Kayla claimed that, growing up, other kids her age would hang out on street corners while she stayed at home memorizing Windows opcodes, auditing source code, and accepting invitations into private IRC channels where she could learn more from other hackers. She liked using her skills to play tricks on others. A common prank was to “dump” or publish a person’s MySQL database, essentially a map for other hackers to try to steal their e-mails or documents. The ultimate goal was to dox someone, discovering and then posting his or her real-life personal details online.

  Trolling and Internet vigilantism had been around for some time already, but they were becoming increasingly popular in 2008, and it’s no coincidence that at around the same time, anonymizing technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and Tor were also becoming popular. These allowed hackers and regular 4chan users like William to hide their IP addresses, the unique number, typically long with several decimals, assigned to every computer connected to the Internet. Part of the address could correspond to the network the device was part of, and the rest to the individual. If you could figure out someone’s real IP address, you could usually get his or her real name and real address. But if that person was using a VPN, then people (like the police, or rival hackers) trying to “get their dox” would find a fake IP address, sometimes pointing to another computer in another country.

  Trolling was like pranking, but ultimately it meant causing some sort of emotional distress to someone else, often through embarrassment or fear. For some people who couldn’t be accepted in the real world, trolling was an easy route to power and one-upmanship. After displaying her skills to the hacker forum she disrupted, Kayla started regularly trolling people for kicks. She angered at the smallest hint of doubt at her skills and was obsessed with proving herself. She took her aggression out on other hackers, “furfags” (people with a penchant for bestiality), and online pedophiles. Each time she and other hackers would find their personal details, she’d aim to scare them with their information, then post it online or threaten to send it to the police. Around 2008, someone invited Kayla to Partyvan, a sprawling network of chat rooms created by a few people who wanted to unite other IRC networks that were linked to image boards like 4chan. The idea was to better collaborate on raids and create a home for the online phenomenon that people were increasingly referring to as Anonymous.

  Raids, like that on Habbo Hotel, were a step up from trolling because they involved multiple people working together to cause mischief. Eventually, it was the raids that got Anonymous its first real airing in the mainstream press as a single entity—perhaps not surprisingly by a Fox TV News affiliate in Los Angeles. The segment, aired in July 2007, was given the usual sensationalist treatment: whooshing sound effects and flashes of white light. “They call themselves Anonymous they are hackers on steroids,” the anchor said without pausing, “treating the web like a real-life video game.”

  The camera cut to silhouetted hands typing on a keyboard. “Destroy. Die. Attack,” another disembodied voice intoned. “Threats from a gang of computer hackers calling themselves Anonymous.” The segment featured an interview with a MySpace user named “David,” who said tormentors from Anonymous had cracked seven of his passwords.

  “They plastered his profile with gay sex pictures,” the narrator remarked. “His girlfriend left him…. They attack innocent people, like an Internet hate machine.” The words “Internet hate machine” zoomed up onto the screen as the narrator added that Anonymous had issued death threats and threatened to bomb sports stadiums, actual pranks that had indeed been carried out by visitors to /b/.

  “I believe they’re domestic terrorists,” a silhouetted woman said before cutting to a clip of an exploding yellow van. “Their name comes from their secret website,” the reporter continued, as foreboding music began playing in the background. “It requires everyone posting on the site to remain anonymous.”

  “They enjoy doing this,” a silhouetted man said in a deep, distorted voice. Fox described him as a former hacker who had fallen out with Anonymous. “They get what they call ‘lulz.’”

  “Lulz,” the reporter explained, as the word appeared in a large font on the screen and horns played in the background, “Is a corruption of L.O.L., which stands for laugh out loud…. Their pranks are often anti-Semitic or racist.”

  The report foreshadowed how the media would continue to overdramatize the exploits of bored and mischievous teenagers, a nebulous crowd of mostly young males who could spontaneously pool together against a target. If there was a “hate machine” as Fox described it, its cogs and wheels were IRC networks and image boards. And while it was nowhere near as organized as Fox (and future news reports) suggested, the Anons were happy to play up to that portrayal.

  There was no single leader pulling the levers, but a few organizational minds that sometimes pooled together to start planning a stunt. This was what would happen next for Anonymous, on a grander scale. 4chan had spawned lots of raids on small websites and individual people. Soon the mob would pick a target so controversial that its attacks would gain a measure of popular support and require an impressive act of planning. The following year, 2008, was when one of /b/’s raids turned into a full-blown insurgency against the Church of Scientology.

  Chapter 5

  Chanology

  Before Topiary, Sabu, and Kayla could find each other, attack HBGary, and have the conviction to hit a stream of other targets as LulzSec, Anonymous had to grow into something larger than just a mass of young people on image boards or individuals like Topiary making prank calls. In other words, more than just a nuisance. That changed because of the actor Tom Cruise and a video that the Church of Scientology didn’t want anyone to see.

  Cruise had been involved with Scientology since 1990, quickly becoming its most famous celebrity advocate. In 2004 he sat down for an interview with Scientology filmmakers that would be included in a video shown exclusively to church members. The video had all the trimmings of propaganda: an image of Earth in space, flashes of light and the sound of slicing blades as the symbol of Scientology zoomed into view. Then, as an electric guitar urgently began plucking the theme tune to Mission: Impossible, Cruise appeared, dressed in a black turtleneck and wearing a stern expression.

  “I think it’s a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist,” he said. As the Mission: Impossible theme continued playing in the background, the video showed segments of Cruise’s strange monologue, which became increasingly incoherent.

  “Now is the time, okay?” Cruise continued. “People are turning to you so you better know it. You better know it. And if you don’t?” He smiled. “Go and learn it, you know? But don’t pretend you know it or whatever, you know we’re here to help.” Another segment started by showing Cruise, grinning, with his eyes closed, before suddenly convulsing with laughter. “And they said, so, so you have you met an SP [Scientology acronym for Suppressive Person]? Ha ha ha ha! And I looked at them. Ha ha! You know, and what a beautiful thing because maybe one day it’ll be like that. Wow.” Though some of what Cruise was saying made sense, most did not. The church was not exactly keen for the video to get out. In 2007, an unnamed church member decided to leak the video, mailing it on a DVD to an anti-​Scientology campaigner named Patty Pieniadz.

  A former high-ranking Scientolgist, Pieniadz held on to the video for about a year, waiting for the right moment to release it. When she heard that a new biography of Cruise would be released on January 15, 2008, she decided that was her moment. She offered the video to TV network NBC to show exclusively, but to her surprise, it balked at the last minute on copyright concerns. With only a few days to go, Pieniadz had just one other option: the Internet. She had no idea how to upload the video to the Web, so she mailed the DVD to several other people in the hope it would eventually wind up on YouTube. One of those people was Mark Ebner, an investigative journalist in Los Angeles. At 2:00 a.m. West Coast time on January 15, Ebner sent a message to the founder of the media
news website Gawker, Nick Denton, asking if Gawker wanted to host what would later be called “the crazy Tom Cruise video.” Denton was “giddy” with excitement, according to Ebner.

  At around the same time, other copies of the video were being uploaded onto YouTube and promptly being taken down on apparent copyright violations. The Church of Scientology was notoriously litigious, and it is likely that YouTube’s parent company, Google, which had been sued for $1 billion in damages by Viacom in a copyright lawsuit the previous year, did not want to take any chances.

  This did not put off Gawker. On the fifteenth, founder and editor Denton published the video in a blog post titled “The Cruise Indoctrination Video Scientology Tried to Suppress.” In the accompanying article, he wrote, “Gawker is now hosting a copy of the video; it’s newsworthy; and we will not be removing it.” The video went viral almost instantly. To date, Denton’s blog post has received more than 3.2 million views, while a copy of the video that eventually stayed up on YouTube has received more than 7.5 million.

  But things were about to get even more embarrassing for the Church of Scientology, thanks to 4chan and /b/.

  Later that day, at 7:37 p.m. eastern standard time, a /b/ user who had seen Gawker’s story and who, it is claimed, was female, started a discussion thread on the board. The title was simply, “Scientology raid?” Every Original Post on /b/ had to include an image, and she had picked the church’s gold-and-white logo. Her accompanying text was heavy with platitudes and appealed to the regular users of /b/ to galvanize themselves: