Hit the deck: LulzSec and Anonymous start trading blows

Hacker group LulzSec has begun publicly attacking hacker group Anonymous, an action that could lead to a civil war of sorts between the two hacker groups that have similar origins.

LulzSec has begun publicly mocking 4chan.org, the image-sharing message board where Anonymous was reportedly born, on its main Twitter account, which it has used to generate publicity for its attacks. When VentureBeat tried to access 4chan.org, the site was either inaccessible or very slow. That could incite frustration from Anonymous, which has proven time and again that it is a force to be reckoned with.

“Just saw a thread on (4chan.org message board /b/) where they’re trying to hunt us: you /b/tards realize that we are everything you’ve ever tried to be?” Lulzsec said on its Twitter account.

The sparring began when LulzSec initiated a “DDoS Party,” which was a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of games offline. EVE Online, League of Legends and Minecraft all faced outages or significant latency problems. That was enough to get the attention of “/v/,” an internal image sharing board on 4chan.org that focuses on video games.

“That kind of already happened when Lulzsec DDoSed Mincraft and EVE Online,” one user said on Reddit. “(Video game image board /v/) went out in droves and DDoSed to death anything related to Lulzsec. It was like watching a glorious internet civil war take place. ‘We ride our chocobos to war and enter the fray’ was the rallying cry on /v/ today.”

LulzSec has been quick to state that it is not part of Anonymous. But the group basically said it came from the same core group of hackers that would go on to become what the public currently acknowledges as Anonymous. LulzSec’s attacks also bear an increasing resemblance to Anonymous. For instance, Anonymous regularly takes up political causes, and a recent attack on Senate.gov is one of several politically-motivated attacks the LulzSec team has executed. Anonymous members also use the term “lulz” to describe the amusement they get out of hacking websites and other networks.

“We are the concentrated success of 2005 /b/, being ‘hunted’ by the 2011 furry horde. Challenge accepted, losers,” LulzSec said on its Twitter account.

Lulzsec previously broke into Sony’s Sony Pictures site and invited readers to “plunder those 3.5 million music coupons while they can.” It also said it was targeting Sony in retaliation for how it handled the downtime of its PlayStation Network after it was forced to bring down the service and beef up security after an attack by an as-yet unidentified hacker group. It seems like LulzSec’s modus operandi involves breaking into insecure networks for the sake of exposing security flaws or in retaliation for political causes.

Members of the LulzSec group were able to break into the PBS site several days ago and post a fake story that said rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive. It was the third high-profile hacking attack on a private network in a little more than a month. The group was also able to break into the private network of Bethesda Softworks, the game developer behind several popular games like Brink and Fallout 3. LulzSec also opened up a phone line that lets individuals call in to request targets that LulzSec should consider attacking with either an intrusion or a DDoS attack.