Matthew J. Schwartz: "LulzSec Claims Credit for CIA Site Takedown" @ Information Week

Comfort Our Comics, Who Discomfit the Herds, Worldwide.

If the article by Schwartz linked above isn't enough, also in the news this week the same heroic bees lead swarms through the gates to do battle with the war game addicted, apathetic and delusional just hours before.

Peter Bright writes from Ars Technica which has everything to do with expenses:

[Excerpt]

Hacking group Lulz Security is continuing to amuse itself at the expense of others, with the release today of 62,000 e-mail addresses and associated passwords. The group didn't say where it got the information, or how it got it; instead, it exhorted its Twitter followers to create lulz of their own, and use the information to break into Facebook, Twitter, World of Warcraft, and much more—a task often made easy by the use of shared passwords.

The tweets that followed suggest that their followers have risen to the challenge, with numerous tales of multiple e-mail break-ins and account compromises, vandalism of Facebook and dating site profiles, and more.

This comes after another day of distributed denial of service attacks. Following on from Titanic Takeover Tuesday, LulzSec yesterday continued to DDoS various game login servers. In a more daring move, the group brought down cia.gov under a flood of traffic. If its past actions haven't got the attention of law enforcement, the CIA attack is sure to have done so.

The group also embarked on a rather more old-school denial of service attack, flooding not just Web servers but phone switchboards too. They set up a phone number and redirected it to various targets of their choosing—apparently including an FBI office in Detroit—and then asked their Twitter followers to call it. The result? Switchboards swamped with thousands of calls.

The CIA attack, along with a bunch of tweets today mocking HBGary, and the earlier PBS hack, shows that perhaps the group is a little more politically motivated than it lets on. Though ostensibly motivated merely by lulz, seeking amusement from the trouble caused for others, LulzSec's members do seem to retain political leanings similar to their Anonymous forbears. Indiscriminate as they may be—it doesn't matter what line of business you're in, if your systems suffer from basic security flaws, they're happy to exploit you and publish the results—being part of the establishment and acting against the interests of WikiLeaks are both grounds for extra attention from the LulzSec crew.

LulzSec's escapades have also been immortalized in a video from NMA. Never before has the true spirit of 4chan, Anonymous, and LulzSec been captured on film.