Hit the deck: LulzSec and Anonymous start trading blows

Hacker group LulzSec has begun publicly attacking hacker group Anonymous, an action that could lead to a civil war of sorts between the two hacker groups that have similar origins.

LulzSec has begun publicly mocking 4chan.org, the image-sharing message board where Anonymous was reportedly born, on its main Twitter account, which it has used to generate publicity for its attacks. When VentureBeat tried to access 4chan.org, the site was either inaccessible or very slow. That could incite frustration from Anonymous, which has proven time and again that  it is a force to be reckoned with .

“Just saw a thread on (4chan.org message board /b/) where they’re trying to hunt us: you /b/tards realize that we are everything you’ve ever tried to be?” Lulzsec said on its Twitter account .

The sparring began when LulzSec initiated a “DDoS Party,” which was a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of games offline. EVE Online, League of Legends and Minecraft all faced outages or significant latency problems. That was enough to get the attention of “/v/,” an internal image sharing board on 4chan.org that focuses on video games.

“That kind of already happened when Lulzsec DDoSed Mincraft and EVE Online,” one user said on Reddit . “(Video game image board /v/) went out in droves and DDoSed to death anything related to Lulzsec. It was like watching a glorious internet civil war take place. ‘We ride our chocobos to war and enter the fray’ was the rallying cry on /v/ today.”

LulzSec has been quick to state that it is not part of Anonymous. But the group basically said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become what the public currently acknowledges as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed . Anonymous members also use the term “lulz” to describe the amusement they get out of hacking websites and other networks.

“We are the concentrated success of 2005 /b/, being ‘hunted’ by the 2011 furry horde. Challenge accepted, losers,” LulzSec said on its Twitter account.

Lulzsec previously broke into Sony’s Sony Pictures site and  invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.”  It also  said it was targeting Sony  in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to  bring down the service and beef up security  after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. It seems like LulzSec’s modus operandi involves breaking into insecure networks for the sake of exposing security flaws or in retaliation for political causes.

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4Chan is an English-language imageboard website. Launched on October 1, 2003, its boards are primarily used for the posting of pictures and discussion of manga and anime. Users generally post anonymously and the site has been linked to Internet subcultures and activism, most notably Project Chanology. 4chan users have been responsible for the formation or popularization of Internet memes such as lolcats, Rickrolling, ‘Chocolate Rain’, Pedobear, and many others. The site’s ‘Random’ board is by far its most popular and notorious feature. Known as ‘/b/’, there are very minimal rules on posted content. Gawker once jokingly claimed that ‘reading /b/ will melt your brain’. The site’s Anonymous community and culture have often provoked media attention. For media planners, this enterprise is ‘further proof that creativity is everywhere and new media is less accessible’ to advertisement agencies. Journalists looked at how an Internet destination was hijacked for a prank, so that images of Rick Astley appeared instead of the page that was searched for; the coordination of attacks against other websites and Internet users; and covered the reaction to threats of violence that have been posted on the site. The Guardian once summarized the 4chan community as ‘lunatic, juvenile. . . brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.’4chan was started in 2003 in the bedroom of a then-15-year-old student from New York City who posts as ‘moot’. He intended the site to be a place to discuss Japanese comics and anime, an American counterpart to the popular Japanese Futaba Channel (’2chan’) imageboard. Prior to starting 4chan, moot had been a regular participant on the Something Awful forums. The activity of 4chan takes place on message boards and imageboards. The website is split into six categories: Japanese culture, Interests, Creative, Adult (18+), Other, and Misc (18+). These provide for on-topic boards to discuss anime, manga, technology, sport, photography, music, hentai, torrents, travel, physical fitness, as well as a random board. 4chan originally hosted discussion boards on a separate domain called ‘world4ch’, but these were later moved to the dis. 4chan. org subdomain. The site has had at least one employee, a programmer whom moot met via on-line Tetris. All other moderators are volunteers. 4chan is one of the Internet’s most trafficked imageboards, according to the Los Angeles Times. 4chan’s Alexa rank is generally around 700, though it has been as high as number 56 at times. It is provided to its users free of charge and consumes a large amount of bandwidth; as a result, its financing has often been problematic. moot acknowledges that donations alone cannot keep the site on-line, so he has turned to advertising to help make ends meet. However, the explicit content hosted on 4chan has deterred businesses who do not want to be associated with the site’s content. In January 2009, moot signed a new deal with an advertising company; as of February 2009, he was $20,000 in debt and the site was continuing to lose money. Unlike most web forums, 4chan does not have a registration system, allowing users to post anonymously. Any nickname may be used when posting, even one that has been previously adopted, such as ‘Anonymous’ or ‘moot’. In place of registration, 4chan has provided tripcodes as an optional form of authenticating a poster’s identity. As making a post without filling in the ‘Name’ field causes posts to be attributed to ‘Anonymous’, general understanding on 4chan holds that Anonymous is not a single person but a collective (hive) of users. Moderators generally post without a name even when performing sysop actions. A ‘capcode’ may be used to attribute the post to ‘Anonymous ## Mod’, although moderators often post without the capcode. 4chan also has a junior moderation team, called ‘janitors’, who may delete posts or images and suggest that the normal moderation team ban a user, but who can not post with a capcode.

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