The rascally hackers of Lulz Security have unleashed pure havoc on the entire Internet today with the release of 62,000 email-password combos that serve as the login credentials for, well, we’re not exactly sure — the group, better known as LulzSec, won’t say explicitly. But so far Twitter users have reported hacked Gmail, PayPal, Facebook, Hotmail and Twitter accounts related to the stolen data, so it appears that nothing’s safe if you’re unlucky enough to have made the list.
The lulz seem to be going both ways with this one: good and nauseatingly bad. While at least one user reports having received an email chocked full of child pornography, others have gotten (un-earned) super-boosts to their World of Warcraft accounts (at the expense of someone else, of course). All-in-all, it would seem LulzSec’s shenanigans are going precisely according to plan.
In addition to the leak, LulzSec has begun to take shots at an unlikely target: 4Chan.org and its infamous /b/ message board. 4Chan is famously the original home of another hacker group, Anonymous, and is the source of a wide variety of popular Internet memes, like LolCats and Rick Rolling.
According to VentureBeat, the moves against 4Chan began after LulzSec kicked-off a “DDoS party” on a variety of websites and game servers popular with gamers, including that of EVE Online, League of Legends and Minecraft, all of which faced outages or major slow-downs because of the flood of malicious traffic.
Visitors to 4Chan’s /v/ imageboard, whose users focus on video games, caught wind of the attacks, and began their own DDoS campaign against anything related to LulzSec.
Today, LulzSec continued the civil war of the online underground with a series of tweets meant to provoke 4Chan visitors.
“Everybody visit this cool and edgy imageboard, they love new members!” wrote LulzSec on its 150,000-follower-strong Twitter feed, with a link to /b/. “Ask them how to triforce and how to become legion.” LulzSec followed this up with a variety of other tweets drawing attention to /b/, with suggestions for how to annoy its regular users.
It may seem odd to some that LulzSec would hit so close to Anonymous’ home, seeing as they are both hacker groups that have hit similar targets. (Or, in the case of Sony, the same target.) But LulzSec has consistently denied any relation to Anonymous. And now, it seems, the two groups are at war*.
“We are the concentrated success of 2005 /b/, being ‘hunted’ by the 2011 furry horde. Challenge accepted, losers,” Anonymous posted to its Twitter account.
At the beginning of this writting, 4Chan either failed to load or loaded extremely slowly, a sign that a DDoS attack was underway. By the the time of publication, the site was running smoothly.
UPDATE: *Both Anonymous and LulzSec have denied that they are at war. “Saying we’re attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we’re going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger,” said LulzSec on Twitter early Friday afternoon. The Anonymous-associated Twitter feed YourAnonNews furthered that assertion, saying, “We are NOT at war with @LulzSec.”
