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

by Parmy Olson

  “You’re a lucky man,” the guard said quietly as he led Jake out. “I didn’t think they’d give you bail.” The guard led Jake down a corridor and into a small room where he met once again with his mother and another solicitor who worked with Cammerman. Knowing there were cameras waiting outside, their small group wondered how best to leave the courthouse. The solicitor reported that members of the media were waiting at both the front and back entrances to the building for Jake to emerge. If they went out the front, where most of the cameras were, they would at least exit onto a main road where a London black cab was already waiting. If they went out the back, they would need to walk around to hail a cab and would risk meeting more media. Jake’s mother decided it was best to go out the front, together as a family.

  With his hands in his pockets, his book tucked under his arm, Jake walked down to the courthouse’s bright entranceway and stood in front of the main door. Looking out the windows, he could see it was a perfect day outside, spots of sunlight dancing around the sidewalks and through giant deciduous trees across the road. At the bottom of the front entrance steps a throng of photographers and TV cameramen stood waiting in a semicircle, all of them stock-still in expectation. Jake’s mother eyed them warily from inside the building. Jake put on a pair of sunglasses, which his mother had brought along, to hide his amblyopia.

  “Shall we go?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He let out a breath as the glass doors opened in front of him, then stepped through the doorway. The dark mass of photographers erupted into flashing lights, accompanied by an eerie silence. There was no shouting and almost no talking, only the passing of cars and rustling of wind through the trees. When they all got down to street level, Jake flinched as he became engulfed by the crowd. He started slowly shuffling toward the black cab that was waiting for him on the other side of the street. Just inches away from his face, the cameras were exploding in flashes. The photographers soon enough were shouting to get Jake’s attention, knowing the cab was near and their time was short.

  “Jake! Jake!” It was the Guardian’s Charles Arthur, who was jostling against the photographers to get Jake’s attention. “What’s the book?” Jake stopped to look at him, then held up the paperback for everyone to see, the one he’d been reading in his jail cell. The cameras flashed and clicked frantically. It was called Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy of Science, about how scientists would do anything—lie, steal, or cheat—to pursue new discoveries. For the first time, as Jake looked through his sunglasses into one of the cameras, he gave a tiny, almost imperceptible smile.

  After his court appearance, Jake took a train up to northern England to the house he would be living in with his younger brother, his mother, and her partner. The police would fit an electronic tag onto his ankle to notify them if he ever broke his curfew. He never would, becoming so paranoid about breaking his bail conditions that he refused to listen to a YouTube video over the telephone when someone offered it. Photos of Jake’s face after leaving the courthouse were shared across the Internet. How did Anons react to seeing the real Topiary for the first time? They presented him as a martyr, superimposing his face onto movie posters from The Matrix to make new propaganda images. Sabu, Kayla, and many others changed their Twitter avatars to read “Free Topiary.” Other hackers with Anonymous who were still at large followed the developments of Jake’s trial and wondered how he would fare. But since phone numbers were rarely given out in Anonymous, none of the hundreds of people Topiary had chatted to on AnonOps knew how to get in touch with him after his arrest. This meant that once he got home, Jake was met with complete silence.

  Three months after his court appearance, a few letters had come through the door—some from journalists and one or two pieces of fan mail. Jake had gone from communicating with hundreds of thousands of people every day online to opening the occasional piece of mail, talking mostly to his immediate family, watching TV, playing computer games, and trying to use a typewriter to express his thoughts.

  Then there came a chance for something different. After a few months of his new, sequestered existence, Jake was offered the unique opportunity to talk to someone from Anonymous face to face. It was not someone he had collaborated with or even met in person. It was William.

  Like William, Jake Davis would never have found his way to the front lines of the Anonymous phenomenon if he hadn’t first found 4chan. This seemingly innocuous website, still mostly unknown to the mainstream but beloved by millions of regular users, was at the heart of what had driven Anonymous to get the world’s attention. Despite the headline-grabbing actions of hackers, the roots and lulz ethos of Anonymous was still firmly in image boards.

  From the time he was fourteen, Jake had been learning how to maneuver the hordes on 4chan and entertain them on other websites. William was different. From fourteen right up until he was twenty-one, his age in 2012, William still rarely left the world of /b/, the ever-popular random thread on 4chan. There were many like him—oldfags who believed they were the true Anons. The site continued to be a home to twenty-two million unique visitors a month, 65 percent of whom were male, ages eighteen to thirty-five, and living in North America or Western Europe. Like many other web forums, 4chan was a place to discuss a wealth of subjects both crass and sophisticated, from camera lenses on the photography board to Victorian authors on the /lit/ board. But thousands of visitors each day still went straight to /b/, hoping to discover an “epic thread” that saw 4chan make its mark on the real world, anything from ruining someone’s life to raiding a website to finding a kidnapped girl.

  William was still pulling all-nighters on 4chan, terrorizing the enemies of his beloved /b/ and trying to improve his hacking skills. News of Topiary’s arrest had been disappointing—he had liked the guy on that Westboro video—but it had also made him more determined to become a hacker himself. William reasoned that since his emotions were so extreme, prison would be either mind-numbingly boring (which wouldn’t matter because he was so depressed at home anyway) or “a laugh.” Either way, he did not care about the consequences.

  “I won’t get caught, I am certain,” he explained.

  William’s online exploits had become bolder, sometimes including a gang of others from /b/ to help him torment a wider group of people. For example, a few days before Christmas 2011, William was browsing what he lovingly referred to as “my /b/” when he saw a thread that started: “Post their contact info if you hate them.” These types of threads were common on /b/ and often heralded a night of fun for William.

  Among the responses, one user had posted the phone number and Hotmail address of a sixteen-year-old girl in Texas named Selena, adding, “Make this girl’s life hell. She’s a slut.” When William looked her up on Facebook, he saw she had more than three thousand friends on the network. He decided to try to hack her account.

  He wrote down Selena’s e-mail address on a piece of paper, went to Hotmail, clicked on the link that said “Can’t access your account?,” and then hit “Reset account.” He put in Selena’s e-mail address, then answered the security question: “What is your father’s hometown?” Selena’s Facebook page showed that she lived in Joshua, Texas, which was the correct answer.

  It then asked: “What is your grandfather’s occupation?”

  William sighed. He signed into one of his fake Facebook profiles, Chrissie Harman, and sent Selena a direct message.

  “There’s a group of hackers after you,” he told her without bothering to introduce himself. He pasted a screenshot of the thread from /b/ with her contact details as proof. William said he was part of this fictitious hacker gang and that they were dangerous. He was willing to help but would need to be paid.

  “How do I pay you?” Selena asked, worried.

  “Take a photo of yourself with a shoe on your head and a time stamp.” In the past he would have wanted nude photos, but by now William had plenty and couldn’t be bothered to ask. Sure enough, within a few minutes, Selena had taken a self-portrait and sen
t it over. William felt a small victory.

  “OK. Now I’ll ask you questions to help secure your account,” William said. He could have just told her to remove her security questions. Instead he bombarded her with technical-sounding gibberish about “randomized answers,” “servers,” and “a database string input,” a deliberate tactic in social engineering. Distract someone with enough misinformation and that person will forget what you are really trying to get, or to hide. “Pick a number between 1 and 100,” he said. “What’s your mother’s middle name? Mine’s is Deborah.” After every answer of hers, he replied, “Yes, that will work very well.”

  Then he asked, “What does your grandfather do?”

  “Oil,” Selena said. William opened his other window and quickly typed oil into Hotmail. Nothing. He tried oil operative, oil technician, and oil executive. They didn’t work either. He would have to try something else.

  “Ok. My questions will get more technical now, but don’t worry,” William said. “This will really secure it. After this you’ll be un-hackable forever.” He asked Selena how many e-mail accounts she had and how many characters were in her average password. Then he asked her to type out her Hotmail password backward.

  “Here’s mine,” he offered, pasting gibberish. Selena hesitated, then she typed it out. Within a few minutes, William had gotten into her e-mail account, and then he activated a series of steps that allowed him to reset her Facebook account too, still asking her questions so she wouldn’t get suspicious.

  Before she could answer his last question, he went into her account settings and signed her out. He set up secure browsing to mask his IP address, then changed the password again. He went back to /b/.

  “I’m in this girl’s account,” he said, starting a new thread and pasting a link to her Facebook profile. “Give me ideas for things to do.” One person suggested talking to Selena’s boyfriend, a local boy named James Martinez. William decided that was a good idea. He went ahead and changed Selena’s relationship status from “in a relationship” to “single” then sent boyfriend James a direct message.

  “OMG I accidentally made us single!” he told him, now in the guise of Selena. “Can you give me your password so I can log into your Facebook and accept our relationship status again?” James agreed, but when he sent over the password boobies1, it didn’t work.

  Exasperated, William passed the work on James off to another prankster on /b/. That was the benefit of having a /b/ behind you—if you got stuck on a problem, someone else could help you fix it. A couple of /b/ users had by now contacted William via their own fake Facebook profiles, and one, who used the fake name Ben Dover, offered to get James’s correct password. Soon enough, James realized he wasn’t talking to his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Selena, but a malicious hacker. The Caps Lock went on.

  “I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR HEAD IN,” he told William, who laughed.

  “It was possibly the funniest moment of the night for me,” William later said. “I really like it when people get angry without realizing how helpless they are. It’s like walking up to the biggest man in a nightclub and saying ‘I’ll knock you out.’ It’s just not going to happen.”

  James’s tirade had continued. “I’m going to slit your throat you faggot,” he wrote. In another window, Ben Dover reported that he was almost in James’s Facebook account.

  “I’m going to do it now,” Ben finally said.

  “Ok do it now,” said William.

  There was silence from James for about ten minutes. Then came a new message from James’s account in the same chat window: “I’m in.” It was Ben. William smiled. After chatting to Ben more, William realized he was a /b/rother who understood the art of trolling softly. This was a more subtle form of pranking. For example, it was funny to hack someone’s Facebook profile and post porn on his wall, but funnier still to make it seem that the person had accidentally uploaded a porn link himself.

  William and Ben set up a private Facebook group and pasted a link to it on /b/. After half an hour about fifty other fake Facebook profiles, all linked to /b/ users, had joined. The group discussed ideas for what to do next.

  For now, William wanted to keep Selena’s Facebook login credentials to himself. Selena, with her network of three thousand Facebook friends, was the jewel in his crown. As soon as he signed in to her account, ten tabs of chat messages flashed up from boys trying to talk to her. It was a reminder of how big a magnet teenage girls could be online and how blinded a man could become when he thought he was talking to one. This was the benefit the person behind Kayla found in being a sixteen-year-old girl online. William picked one of the boys trying to chat to Selena, Max Lopez, and sent a reply.

  “Hey, babe :),” William wrote, still as Selena. “What you up to?” Max responded, and the two embarked on inane small talk, Max oblivious of the fact that he was actually talking to a twenty-one-year-old man in the United Kingdom.

  “I’m kinda horny :D,” William typed out. The conversation that followed was like hundreds William had had before. Weeks later, when William described it in a quiet café, he looked off to the side, his hands held firmly together. As he searched for the memory, he seemed to enter a trance, suddenly reciting an oddly seductive dialogue as if he were Selena again:

  “Sorry,” he had told Max Lopez, “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s terrible.”

  “It’s alright,” Max had replied.

  “My boyfriend never does anything these days and I just want to be really slummy.”

  “You shouldn’t do that if you have a boyfriend.”

  “I know. It’s terrible…Sometimes I find a guy that’s up for it.”

  “Oh. You found guys that have done stuff before?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well I hope you find someone.”

  “I was kinda hoping it would be you.” Pause. “I feel dumb.”

  “No, don’t worry.”

  “Do you send pictures normally?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, if it’s not too weird maybe I could send you a picture. And if you don’t like it, that’s ok.” William then dug through his collection of downloaded porn and found a photo of a young woman’s breasts that he figured would pass for Selena’s, based on what he could see from her profile picture. Then he sent it over.

  The goal was to get Max Lopez to send back a photo of his own genitalia. Like a charm, it worked. As soon as William sent over the photo of breasts, Lopez promptly sent back a photo of his own penis. “They’re all desperate to be complimented on their penises,” William said. “I don’t know why guys think girls want to see that but it works.”

  “Oh my God this is so hot,” William had written back as he opened another window and posted Max’s photo in the private Facebook group with his /b/rothers. “Everybody add Max Lopez,” he told them.

  Soon Max was being bombarded with friend requests from the fifty other fake Facebook profiles. Apparently not too suspicious, Max accepted friendship from fifteen of them. William and his /b/ cohorts went to Max’s profile page and looked for Facebook friends that had the same last name, Lopez.

  When the group thought they had identified an account that was Max’s brother, William corroborated the information with Max directly. “Oh, I think I went to high school with your brother,” he said, still as Selena. “What’s his name again?” Max replied that it was Kevin. Now William and the /b/rothers had mapped out Max’s immediate family. It was time to pounce.

  “Don’t block me,” William suddenly said. Even in text, the tone had changed as his charade as Selena came to an end. “I have your penis picture and I’m going to send it to all of your family if you don’t give me your Facebook password.”

  Max Lopez was stunned, and soon enough, distraught. He was seventeen. He worked for his local church. This wasn’t going to look good.

  “I felt bad, but I just laughed,” William remembered. Out of desperation, Max gave his password, but William had no qualms about going bac
k on his deal. Once he was in Max’s account, he took the penis photo and posted it on the Facebook wall of Max’s mother, along with the message “Hi, mom. Here’s a picture of my cock. Tell me what you think. LOL.” Other /b/rothers from William’s private Facebook group had been given access to Max’s account too and were now posting the photo to around ten of Max’s friends and family members. The benefit of posting from different accounts was that it was almost impossible for a person to block all of them. As others in the Facebook group took over spamming Max’s social network with his genitalia, William moved on to other boys in Selena’s chat list and did the same thing all over again.

  It had been months since William had laughed as much as he did that night. It was “a perfect evening” that finished at around nine the next morning. In the end, his team hacked into more than ten different Facebook accounts, all thanks to his access to Selena.

  “We split up several boyfriends and girlfriends and appalled many people’s mothers,” William remembered. “That’s one of the bits I enjoy more. Sending a picture of someone’s cock to their mum. The idea of it happening to me is so unimaginably embarrassing it makes me laugh.”

  What he loved doing even more, from the time he’d begun pedo-baiting, at fifteen, was getting another man online highly aroused and then suddenly dousing the moment with the threat of exposure to family and friends or police. As his victim shot from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other, William was offering him a brief glimpse into what he felt all the time. What he called a “bleach shower, a reactive depression, a hot flush and shiver at the same time.” Hacking into people’s Facebook accounts wasn’t exactly life-altering, but he got a buzz from knowing that at least for a moment, his victims felt their lives crumbling around them.

  “I’d be lying if I said there was any great reason,” he said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms to reveal a large hole in his sweater, near the armpit. “I don’t feel guilty, it makes me laugh and it wastes a night. That’s all I want from 4chan. I want something that’s going to leave me not depressed and give me something to focus on. And it’s fun to make someone feel that awful from such a distance. I could never do it face-to-face.”