LulzSec: goodbye and thanks for the Lulz

David Heath
Tuesday, 28 June 2011 00:04

Business IT - Security

According to a statement posted yesterday, the LulzSec boat has sailed its last voyage.  Will the world ever be the same?

With yesterday's announcement that LulzSec is to terminate its mission to embarrass the (self-assumed) technorati of the world, we are left wondering four things'¦

1. Who were those guys (to steal a line from 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid')?

2. Was it worth it?

3. Will anything matter??

4. What will be different in the 'new (post LulzSec) world?'

To answer question zero (sorry, couldn't resist, it's the programmer in me!), if you follow the link, pretty-much everything the guys obtained from their hacks is there for the taking.  For the yet-to-be-educated, the initial question was, 'what did they get, can I have it?'

So firstly, who were those guys?  As yet, no-one knows (well, no-one who's talking).  There are a lot of guesses out there, but it seems that the sudden focus on Ryan Cleary by a variety of enforcement agencies might be misplaced.

The group themselves claim that they had six members but there is little to determine what is truth and what is not.  The recently released chat room conversation purportedly from the team (and please, pay no attention to the link to the Zeus botnet source code) identifies more than six, but who knows whether it is real.

Question two (was it worth it?) has two very different answers, and it depends upon in which camp you reside.