LulzSec's real agenda? Who knows, but they love the Dreamcast

Well, that tears it. LulzSec, a band of hackers that has made headlines for a number of high-profile hacking incidents, are a bunch of gaming hipsters.

The hacking group has been gleefully attacking a lot of gaming networks such as online role-playing game EVE Online and indie sandbox game Minecraft. But LulzSec hackers have also avoided sabotaging certain games that have niche appeal in the gaming community -— indicating the group has some kind of agenda outside of its goal of wanton destruction on the web.

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The group broke into Bethesda Softworks and could have taken information regarding 200,000 Brink players, who play an online first-person shooter game that includes parkour-style movement, but chose not to do so. That game was not rated well by critics, but has a cult following among some gamers. The group also publicly offered assistance to Sega, which was recently hit by attacks from an unknown hacking group.

“@Sega – contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down,” LulzSec said on its main Twitter account.

The Dreamcast was Sega’s last console, released ahead of the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Gamecube, and featuring advanced graphics and online play. The console ended up being the company’s swan song in the hardware industry after a spectacular run with the Sega Genesis, and Sega has since shifted to just producing games for other hardware companies like Nintendo. But there are still vibrant communities that adore the Dreamcast, and many games were so popular that Sega began porting them to the Xbox Live Arcade. That means gamers can download popular Sega Dreamcast cames like Sonic Adventure and play them on the Xbox 360.

LulzSec said it was mostly doing the hacks for fun and was enjoying unleashing havoc on the Internet. It’s similar to Anonymous, when the group didn’t take on significant political and moral causes like the hacktivist group does today. The group also said that there was a lot of information taken from the networks it had broken into that the group had not publicly released. It has released gobs of sensitive data and passwords taken from users of various sites like CIA.gov.

“This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction. There are peons and lulz lizards; trolls and victims,” the group said in an official announcement.

While the group hasn’t been shy about taunting 4chan.org and Anonymous users, it quickly backpedaled and said that it was not planning on attacking anonymous. The two groups began sparring when LulzSec initiated a set of large-scale distributed denial of service attacks on several gaming servers and websites that brought a lot of online-centric 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.

“To confirm, we aren’t going after Anonymous. 4chan isn’t Anonymous to begin with, and /b/ is certainly not the whole of 4chan. True story,” LulzSec said in its main Twitter account. “Saying we’re attacking Anonymous because we taunted /b/ is like saying we’re going to war with America because we stomped on a cheeseburger.”

The group 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.

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Lulzsec previously broke into the 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. Members of the LulzSec group were able to break into the PBS site several days ago and post a fake story saying that rapper Tupac Shakur was still alive.