The FBI vs. the Prankster Hackers

After an international investigation lasting several months, the FBI have arrested five hackers belonging to the mischievous group LulzSec. Are they really that dangerous?

In July 2011, readers of the online version of The Sun newspaper, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, rubbed their eyes in collective astonishment: Murdoch, aged 80, was said to have ingested a large quantity of palladium before stumbling into his famous topiary garden late at night, passing out in the early hours of the morning. “We found the chemicals sitting beside a kitchen table, recently cooked,” one officer stated.

At the time, the Murdoch that the hackers had killed off was not exactly popular, as it had just been revealed that his journalists had hacked into the voicemails of British celebrities. It is widely suspected that the boss of the newspaper group was aware of what had been going on. The fake story was posted the day before Murdoch was due to be questioned on the scandal by the British parliament.

Two months earlier, the U.S. public television broadcaster, PBS, had run a program called “WikiSecrets,” about the WikiLeaks web portal, which had stolen and published hundreds of thousands of secret reports by U.S. soldiers and diplomats. Shortly after the program was broadcast, the news appeared on PBS’s website that the famous rapper Tupac Shakur was doing well and living in a small town in New Zealand — the same Tupac who was shot dead on a Los Angeles street in 1996. The people responsible for the hoax took to Twitter, announcing, “Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching ‘WikiSecrets’ and were less than impressed. We decided to sail our boat over to the PBS servers. No fortress can withstand our barrage of chaos and lulz.”

Both jokes bore the hallmark of LulzSec, a loose fraternity of hackers, which the FBI had been tracking across the world for over a year. It was announced this week that their investigation had been a complete success, with one of LulzSec’s ringleaders having been arrested as early as last year. Surprised by agents bursting in on his New York apartment, the unemployed Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, decided to cooperate with the FBI to save his skin. Day and night, he helped U.S. investigators hunt down his colleagues. Five “dangerous hackers” have now been arrested in the United States, Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Monsegur also belonged to Anonymous, another group of hackers, which first came to prominence when it mounted an attack in protest after the WikiLeaks portal had been blocked and pulled from Amazon.com’s servers, and credit card providers had refused to handle donations to WikiLeaks. In response, Anonymous attacked the Amazon and MasterCard websites, causing them briefly to go offline.

After that, the hactivists, as hackers who find pleasure in righting the world and mocking its fat cats call themselves, moved to attack the websites of the governments of Tunisia and Egypt to help the Arabs who were revolting against their dictators. However, they also notched up successes such as blocking the website cia.gov for a few hours (although the block itself was harmless, it was still highly embarrassing for the world’s largest intelligence agency). They also boasted of having stolen around a gigabyte of NATO data, saying: “Of course, we’re not going to publish anything. But shame on NATO…”

LulzSec’s activities may have been merely irreverent in nature, but the U.S. government in general has no sense of humor — not just the FBI, which tracked the pranksters over a number of months and now claims to have “cut off the Hydra’s head.” General Keith Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, told the Wall Street Journal that he was concerned that hactivists would soon be able to interfere with the U.S. power supply on a large scale. The bureau is reportedly preparing for the worst-case scenario, in which the governments of enemy states hire Anonymous or LulzSec to launch a massive cyber-attack on America.

“How could we turn off the power without which we, as users of the network, practically would not exist?” mocked LulzSec hactivists on Twitter. They are astonished to be mentioned in the same breath as al-Qaida terrorists, Latin American drug cartels and the Chinese hackers who steal state or technological secrets from the U.S. “Are we one of the main threats to America?” they ask, outraged. “We who do not have weapons, we do not sell drugs? Are we planning to paralyze the country or harm ordinary people in any way? It’s like hunting down the organizers of street parties as zealously as proper villains!”

Some are arguing that an alarmist rhetoric is now being employed against the groups of prankster hackers similar to the kind used by Bush administration prior to the invasion of Iraq — and back then, as we know, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.