Sunday, April 27, 2014

We Are Anonymous Chapter 20

Hey people, and welcome back to more summaries of We Are Anonymous. Where we left off, LulzSec just pulled off an impressive assault on LulzSec's enemies. We were left at a cliffhanging conclusion; what will the Anons do next? Well, here it is; the moment we've all been waiting for. Today we're going to find out what happens in chapter 20, so without further ado, let's get straight to it!

The chapter starts off with LulzSec's list of targets getting larger and larger. More vulnerabilities on the Internet were getting revealed. The Anons were looking for a BIG vulnerability that would lead to a BIG company being harrassed, and they found a great potential target; Sony. Sony, as you know, was a big company excelling in selling various home electronics such as TVs and the like. LulzSec decided to play around with it a bit by stealing a ton of data from Sony's servers: 3.5 million music coupons, user details of hundreds of thousands of Sony user accounts, there was a trove of treasure hidden under that website (underneath security that LulzSec was intelligent enough to crack).

For the hackers, Sony had a fatal weakness: First of all, all the passwords, usernames and classified user details were typed in PLAINTEXT. The only people who had encrypted user details were the admins, and this wasn't such a problem for LulzSec because they managed to decrypt it anyway. After robbing another batch of 3.5 million music coupons, taking care of the music codes and the admin tables, the hackers spent THREE WEEKS compiling their stolen databases and downloading them. After doing all these, they decided to get all this loot online, causing mass ruckus within the public.

The hackers have been working day and night on this massive project. No matter what time zone a hacker was in, he stayed up with other hackers' time zones to complete the job together. With the combined help of the hackers, they made a Sony database full of Sony products that weren't supposed to be released yet (you could imagine Sony's outrage). However, the hackers also had to protect their precious database from potential DDoS attacks from enemy hackers, which could prove fatal. Needless to say, they succeeded in doing this and received tons of other followers in their Twitter account.

After the Sony assault, LulzSec proceeded with stealing e-mails from other databases. Meanwhile, Emick reveals that another reason Sabu was resentful was because of a job he didn't succeed in qualifying. Sabu was also revealed to despise "white hat" hackers (hackers that did hacking for non-malicious reasons), apparently after a bad experience with them. This was the reason Sabu really wanted to qualify in a new assault on the Internet; Hijazi. Hijazi was known for hunting down malicious botnets, making a good sum of money doing so.

To do this, they decided to try a different technique: Misdirection. They posed as innocent people who gave tips to Hijazi. Sabu and Topiary played a big role in this. With the assistance of a new hacker named Fox, they managed to extort some data from Hijazi. The rest of the chapter was about LulzSec's discussion about how things were going on in the Web. Apparently they were discussing about any vulnerabilities on the Web and how they could exploit them.

Well, that concludes another day in the life of a typical LulzSec hacker. I wonder what other website they'll hack next? What new enemy will be lurking in the shadows for them? Well, we'll just have to find out in the next chapter. Goodbye for now!

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