The laughs are reportedly over for five top members of the hacker group LulzSec who were arrested on Tuesday and charged as part of a conspiracy case filed in New York federal court. FoxNews.com reports that the arrests were part of a multinational sting across the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States on Tuesday morning, and LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, who operated online under the alias ^aEURoeSabu,^aEUR provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation with information leading to the arrests.
Something is wrong here. Why would they tell everyone this story? FBI got only 5 “top hackers” and decided to tell everyone about this Sabu guy and put his strange photos on the web? Don’t buy it…
Depends, if there are any retaliations from Anonymous we will see.
What usually happens in cases like this is that they arrest one member of the group, threaten him with twenty years in jail or more, and then offer to cut it down to a much shorter sentence if he cooperates. So when you read that a leader is “working with the FBI” that doesn’t mean he was an agent provocateur all along, but that he was “turned” at some point and allowed to continue to act like a member of the group until they could arrest everyone else.
Anyone engaging in online civil disobedience has to consider the possibility that people they are working with might be government agents and that even people they have known a long time might sell out the group to save themselves.
On the other hand, some of the Anon schemes were so lame (like the tools for DDoS that made no attempt at all to cloak participants) that I wonder if they weren’t law enforcement stings from the beginning.
If this story is true the FBI really must have a strange sense of justice. I mean, really, working together with _the leader_ of a “criminal” group to catch others?
Does anybody wonder if any recent LulzSec attack was orchestrated by this Sabu guy on behalf of the FBI?
Edited 2012-03-06 19:35 UTC
Birds of a feather flock together?
Anyway, it is an odd sort of publicity – almost like they’re trotting this guy out just to see how much backlash he receives now. Clearly they intended to make an example out of him in order to demoralize all his “followers”…
I suspect it won’t work.
Wouldn’t shock me if it was a false flag op from day one. The same could be said of Anonymous itself, just a little nudge to get the all too willing dupes to provide you with an excuse…
I love the hyperbole in the articles.
Uhmm..does this person know how big the world is?
Yeah, like spending money on morons like Sabu and his like to “verify” or “pen-test”.
And this is my personal favorite:
This is so far-fetched and hilariously ridiculous that there’s really nothing to add.
Yeah, that must be why he got caught; because he’s so good. For sure.
Edited 2012-03-07 07:55 UTC
How long before the other cracktards out there take down the FBI’s website again as a ‘retaliatory strike’
They always try to push these types of arrests as being ‘cutting off the head of the snake’ — when these are just a few whackjobs and screwups (That Jeremy guy for example — 2nd offense too, previous offense he was turned in BY a 2600 club) that the real cracking community is as likely to turn in just for giving the scene a bad name…
… and that the goofy little up and coming script kiddies with their rah-rah fight the man attitude will come out of the woodwork to rally around.