By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie

After 50 days of shenanigans, “lulz,” and fearmongering by the mainstream media, the now-infamous LulzSecurity, or LulzSec, has announced an end to their campaign. I found this quite surprising, especially given they just recently announced a new joint operation with Anonymous entitled “Anti-Sec.” Why was their crusade so short lived? Why end without carrying out any of the grandiose promises and threats published across the internet? Why prove themselves to be yet another blow-hard hacker group that does way more talking and hyping than hacking?

To keep from going out without so much as a fizzle, the group did a final dump of stolen information garnered through their various escapades including data from Office Networks of Corporations, AOL Internal Data, Battlefield Heroes data (50k users), FBI being Silly, Private Investigator Emails, Random Gaming forums (50k users), Nato-bookshop.org (12k users), AT&T internal data, and Hackforums.net (200k users). However, the dump was hastily removed from the Pirate Bay, so maybe going out with a fizzle is a bit of an overstatement.

Is this group of “super-brain hackers” doing what any remotely intelligent and effective hacking group does by going underground and obfuscating themselves? The fact that LulzSec was clearly thriving off of the media attention and, in fact, actively seeking it out through IamA posts on Reddit and their public Twitter account was always a bit fishy. The world’s best hacking groups are largely unknown outside of the cybersecurity community and that is the way they like it. Could LulzSec be attempting to get out of the spotlight in order to carry out more serious attacks? Or are they actually disbanding without managing to leak any real secrets or information other than the personal information of innocent internet users and police officers?

I would like to think that they are actually disbanding and giving up on their childish crusade which would undoubtedly lead to China-style internet control here in the United States. However, until we see months free of these attacks, we cannot say for sure if this is a hoax or the real deal. This very well might be another “disinformation campaign,” which the Guardian seemed to think we fell for.

Apparently they do not know what a hypothesis is, but that is another issue altogether. If the authors of the above linked piece had bothered to read my entire article (or maybe even my series of articles on LulzSec) they would have noticed that I am entertaining these notions and weighing the evidence for each side, I am not attempting to prove they are a “crack” team of CIA agents or anything of the sort. If you actually understand what a hypothesis is, then this fact is very clear. In this article I am doing the same thing, analyzing the data and attempting to come out with a  cogent picture that conforms with objective reality and history. This is something the mainstream media never manages to do, leading them to constantly change their story and usually present an inaccurate or incomplete picture.

Is this really the end of LulzSec or will we see more attacks carried out for similar (or the same) ends by groups under different monikers? All we can do is make an educated guess at this point. I hypothesize that the attacks will continue but they will be ascribed to a new, more menacing group. I sincerely hope that I am completely wrong and that they will go on with their lives and we can enjoy our internet freedoms.

Update: Also check out the personal information of alleged LulzSec members gathered and released by the hacker group “A-Team.” I have uploaded it in .TXT format for posterity here:

LulzSec member information released by A-Team

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