Eight months ago, I published a statement in which I revealed, after close monitoring of a top-secret chat room used by high-ranking members of the Anonymous movement, that one Anonymous/LulzSec ring leader Sabu was a computer security analyst living in the New York metropolitan area.
Today, FOX News published a report based on court documents and interviews with law enforcement officials that corroborated this information, identifying Sabu as a father of two (which was originally published in my statement, but the information about children was removed about an hour later) living in — guess where? New York.
I also remember Pastebin documents many months ago which also referred to Sabu by name, and his address was verifiable with public information, but at the time there were blanket denials about it being the same guy. So it’s kind of amusing to see that all that info was right.
Meet Hector Xavier Monsegur, better known as “Sabu,” the defacto leader of the hacking collective LulzSec, which made a name for itself with a number of high-profile incidents last year. Monsegur, a New York City resident, was actually pinpointed by the FBI in June. However, he did something pretty major — fearing jail time would separate him from his two young children, he reluctantly agreed to work with the FBI to take down other members of the LulzSec group, going so far as to reportedly work out of FBI offices to help. The takedown happened today, with five arrests taking place. Pretty crazy, right? You said it.
You can’t arrest an idea, but you CAN arrest a self-important dorkus malorkus who thinks he’s Neo.
You know, it’s worth noting that the LulzSec Twitter account has not updated since his arrest. Also, this kid has the look of a guy you just want to dislike.
Topiary, LulzSec’s most public member and second-in-command has reportedly been arrested. He’s the one that ran LulzSec’s Twitter and wrote all of their eloquent messages — and he was only 19. Topiary deleted every tweet from his personal twitter and left only one: “You can’t arrest an idea,” pointing more to the fact that he was arrested and even knew it was coming. LulzSec will undoubtedly confirm or deny all of this soon enough, but this all comes on the heels of a sting which nailed 14 members of Anonymous, which reportedly has ties to the more-low-key group. source
» If the hearing wasn’t enough to make Murdoch sweat, LulzSec might be able to do the trick. They’re reportedly going to release a whole bunch of emails from News International staffers. Those emails will show what various people in the organization know, if they know anything about the phone hacking. They’ve already released Rebekah Brooks’s email password.
Damn. (thanks to all who sent this in)
Update: Now it’s just down. An interesting day in Sun-ville.
Looks like The Sun has been hacked. The News Corp-owned UK newspaper’s website is currently redirecting to another domain (http://www.new-times.co.uk/sun/) which lands on a big, screaming headline: ”Media moguls body discovered.” At the bottom: “Lulz.”
The (untrue!) story goes:
Rupert Murdoch, the controversial media mogul, has reportedly been found dead in his garden, police announce.
Murdoch, aged 80, has said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late last night, passing out in the early hours of the morning.
“We found the chemicals sitting beside a kitchen table, recently cooked,” one officer states. “From what we can gather, Murdoch melted and consumed large quantities of it before exiting into his garden.”
No word yet from The Sun, whose twitter account most recently tweeted, “Oh shizzle,” before pointing towards a story about Snoop Dogg. But Lulz Security, the group that’s famously hacked PBS, Sony, and the CIA over the past few months appears to be taking credit. Just 20 minutes ago they tweeted, “The Sun’s homepage now redirects to the Murdoch death story on the recently-owned New Times website. Can you spell success, gentlemen?” And you thought they’d disbanded.
Today in news stories combining into one.
Stick a fork in them, they’re done: The hacker group LulzSec claims that after 50 planned days of mayhem, they’ve finished their efforts and have moved on, claiming that the AntiSec movement will take its place. Which kinda came out of nowhere. What does that mean? Either way, here’s a lulzworthy ditty to remember these guys by.
If in fact Lulz Security is responsible for doing this, it should be noted that this is also notable for being really humorless for them. They’re generally known, even as they take on very powerful targets, for being kind of sarcastic and snarky in the way that they announce these things publicly … there’s none of that going on here.Rachel Maddow • Offering her take on the massive data dump that LulzSec reportedly just got away with. This is why we’re surprised too. Arizona law enforcement officials claim that a hack did take place, but no info on what, specifically, the hackers took. We just want to float an idea by you guys, a theory … what if these hacks that the group did prior to this one acted as a trojan horse? What if it was simply a mechanism for the group to draw tons of attention to themselves, so they’d be able to pull off a release of something really serious like this, and everyone would pay attention? You know, Wikileaks without the newspapers working as catalysts? This is the kind of hack you wouldn’t be able to sell if you were just getting started — it’s too multidimensional in its conceit. It’s almost like the group used all these other, attention-grabbing hacks because they knew they had something big. Just a thought.
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LulzSec goes after Arizona law enforcement: They said they did so because of SB1070, a.k.a. last year’s controversial immigration law. This release, which certainly has shades of Wikileaks, seems like the motherlode compared to some of their other releases — training materials, confidential e-mails, intelligence bulletins and so on — you know, pretty much a primer on how law enforcement conducts itself in the state. Damn. And you thought the CIA hack was a big deal. Compared to this, it’s small potatoes.
Officials called his arrest “very significant” and the rising spate of cyberattacks “deeply worrying.” As we pointed out yesterday, LulzSec said that Cleary wasn’t tied to the group. However, reports from The Guardian suggest that he at least had a tenuous tie — as the host of an IRC chatroom that the group reportedly uses — though he wasn’t directly involved with the group. “No way is he capable of pulling off what LulzSec are doing,” a source said. LulzSec denies involvement in the reported attack that led to Cleary’s arrest — a break into the British Census database. British information security officials say they haven’t received evidence from the Office for National Statistics that supports such an attack took place, however. source
So, did LulzSec’s main dude get taken down? Widespread reports this morning suggest that a hacker named Ryan Cleary got arrested in the UK after a hack of the country’s Census systems. Media reports tied him to LulzSec (some even calling him the ringleader), but authorities would not confirm the fact. And lo and behold, not long after those reports came out, this tweet went up. Our guess: We bet they actually nailed someone, but the group is bluffing so that it doesn’t look so obvious. The group, by the way, has scored blows against multiple governmental agencies, multiple corporations, and has hit the hapless school bully, Sony, numerous times. In pursuit of the lulz (and the Twitter followers … they’re up to 230,000). source
They’re way too close to the flame. They’re going to get burned this time.
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