For a while the best law enforcement in the world including the CIA, the FBI and Scotland struggled to keep up with the hack attacks initiated by Lulz Security, an offshoot of Anonymous. Now the group has decided to call it quits.In a message sent late on Saturday night from the group’s Twitter account, Lulz said it was done after what it called a planned 50-day adventure, and it referred to its crew of six.
Researchers expressed serious doubts that Lulz was going out on its own terms. On Thursday night, it had said it would keep releasing government secrets indefinitely.
Their exit is a relief for authorities including the FBI, which feared that it was building a previously unseen movement combining improved hacking and communication tools with a populist sensibility.
The Financial Times said that by getting inside Sony, security companies and an FBI affiliate, Lulz showed it had the potential to make plain to everyone not only how bad cyber security is, but how ineffective law enforcement is.
The arrest this week of Ryan Cleary, who is accused of working on some simple, brute-force attacks with Lulz, shook the group. One leader told outsiders he was quitting, and another said he was going on vacation.
The final straws may have been the posting of internal chat logs and improved guesses about the real identities of those remaining.
Lulz said its members will continue individual attacks under the banner of “antisec,” or anti-security, and they have already spawned imitators.
Still to be seen is whether Lulz gave that effort enough of a starting push to endanger major national secrets or to force companies to make their systems more secure at last.
