Lulzsec: A life on the open waves

SONY BAITING hacker group Lulzsec has made something of a name for itself as both a hacking force and a mischief maker in recent weeks.

The group, like Anonymous with which it has some common ground, is an apparent loose collective of security experts - some might say hackers - but unlike its peer and as its name suggests, Lulzsec is in it purely for the lulz.

Its Twitter profile describes the group, known in full as Lulz Security, as "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense", while its web site adds, "We're LulzSec, a small team of lulzy individuals who feel the drabness of the cyber community is a burden on what matters: fun."

Although it has had some high profile successes, including hacking an FBI affiliated company and its regular whipping boy Sony, at its heart is having fun, and in one of the group's most recent tweets it listed a few groups that it would never hack.

"Things we would never harm: Sega, Nintendo, Neopets, Old Spice Guy, anyone that owns a boat for the sole purpose of being a pirate," it said.

Even though the group hacked Sony's rival Nintendo, it suggested that there was nothing malicious in its activities. "Re: Nintendo, we just got a config file and made it clear that we didn't mean any harm. Nintendo had already fixed it anyway," it said. It added, "We love Nintendo and Sega, if anything we'd hack *for* them. If you're listening Nintendo/Sega, you, you uh... you want Sony hacked more?"

While it is successful the group is unrepentant about its activities, and when pushed for an apology to those people whose privacy they might have compromised, it said, "Hey innocent people whose data we leaked: blame @Sony."

Blaming Sony,is perhaps not too much of a leap. Although almost a million user names and passwords were exposed, they were apparently very weakly protected and were accessed through a simple SQL injection attack. That's something that might shock many of Sony's cutomers who trusted it with their personal information. µ