LulzSec Announces Manifesto for 1000th Tweet

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the past month or so, there’s been a lot of hacking going on lately.  Sony, Codemasters, Bethseda, PBS, the US Senate, the CIA and many others.  A fair amount of these hacks and random DDOS attacks have been from a group calling themselves LulzSec (for Lulz Security).  The reason they’ve given in general is that they do this ‘for the lulz’.  While this may be, with their 1000th tweet, they’ve explained a bit more about why they’re doing what they’re doing, and the answer is fairly simple:  Internet security is…not.

Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked? We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off? You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value.

This is what you should be fearful of, not us releasing things publicly, but the fact that someone hasn’t released something publicly. We’re sitting on 200,000 Brink users right now that we never gave out. It might make you feel safe knowing we told you, so that Brink users may change their passwords. What if we hadn’t told you? No one would be aware of this theft, and we’d have a fresh 200,000 peons to abuse, completely unaware of a breach.

Not only that, the point is made through their comments that this is also simply the sad state of internet society in general, which is not exactly without merit

And that’s all there is to it, that’s what appeals to our Internet generation. We’re attracted to fast-changing scenarios, we can’t stand repetitiveness, and we want our shot of entertainment or we just go and browse something else, like an unimpressed zombie. Nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan, anyway…

Nobody is truly causing the Internet to slip one way or the other, it’s an inevitable outcome for us humans. We find, we nom nom nom, we move onto something else that’s yummier. We’ve been entertaining you 1000 times with 140 characters or less, and we’ll continue creating things that are exciting and new until we’re brought to justice, which we might well be. But you know, we just don’t give a living fuck at this point – you’ll forget about us in 3 months’ time when there’s a new scandal to gawk at, or a new shiny thing to click on via your 2D light-filled rectangle. People who can make things work better within this rectangle have power over others; the whitehats who charge $10,000 for something we could teach you how to do over the course of a weekend, providing you aren’t mentally disabled.

The full manifesto is available via Pastebin.  The lesson to be learned from this, essentially, is that we each need to take control of our own security.  Outside of that, the latter half of the group’s manifesto should give people something to think about, if they will.    They’re not finished, of course, as their Twitter feed indicates, and also the public themselves are giving LulzSec targets, which should say something right there.