LulzSec Hacking Suspects Are Arrested
For months, The Real Sabu, as he called himself on Twitter, boasted, cursed and egged on his followers to take part in high-profile computer attacks against private companies and government agencies worldwide.
“Don’t give in to these people,” he wrote on Monday, ridiculing the “cowards” in the federal government. “Fight back. Stay strong.”
It turns out that Sabu had become an informant for federal law enforcement authorities. On Tuesday, in what could be one of the biggest breakthroughs in the government crackdown on a loose, large confederation of politically inspired “hacktivists,” he was unmasked and revealed to have helped authorities nab several fellow hackers in Europe and the United States.
Four men in Britain and Ireland were charged Tuesday with a slew of computer crimes; a fifth man was arrested Monday in Chicago.
Court papers identified Sabu as Hector Xavier Monsegur, 28, of New York. He pleaded guilty last August to a dozen counts of conspiracy to attack computers. He had operated since then as usual — as The Real Sabu, instigating attacks and quoting revolutionaries online.
The prosecutions are part of a wave of coordinated efforts by law enforcement officials worldwide to rein in a leaderless, multinational movement called Anonymous, which attracted attention for its protests against the Church of Scientology and in support of the whistleblower site WikiLeaks. It has spawned spinoffs with different names and insignias, among them LulzSec, which claimed to target computer security companies for laughs, or lulz, and of which Sabu was a prominent, outspoken member.
Just last week, Interpol announced the arrests of 25 suspected Anonymous members in Europe. Sabu reacted to that news on Twitter by urging others to attack Interpol’s Web site.
Mr. Monsegur’s base of operations seems to have been his late grandmother’s sixth-floor apartment in a public housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was apparently self-trained, and he appears to have been equally skilled at hacking and deceiving his fellow hackers. His demise, if nothing else, will sow even more distrust and dissension in the ranks of Anonymous.
“It is going to be very difficult for Anonymous to recover from such a breach of trust,” said Mikko Hyponnen, a security researcher at F-Secure Labs in Helsinki. “You can see the Anonymous people now looking left and right and realizing, if they couldn’t trust Sabu, who can they trust?”
Whether this will temper the larger hacktivist cause remains to be seen. Anonymous is a decentralized movement that is, broadly speaking, against state institutions and the companies that work with them, and they have embraced an ever-shifting variety of causes, from animal rights to democracy in the Middle East.