Please tell me more background about that. (I recall mention of this before on HN, but I'm not recalling many details.) What's our best information on how leadership of Anonymous has changed over time?
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for your link, which I think came as an edit to your comment. Here is a link to follow-up news:
But his FBI handlers said he was "brilliant, but lazy": they discovered him selling stolen credit card details on Facebook, and traced him to his home when he used an unguarded internet connection to go on the 2600.com site, which is popular with young and old hackers.
Is 2600.com a honeypot for the FBI? How'd Sabu expose himself by merely visiting that site?
Speaking of which, there's publicly available security software that can (try to) identify original sources of phrases, identify links between websites and who said what first, etc. One example: http://www.paterva.com/web6/products/maltego.php
Someone else should step up and give a comprehensive overview, because I can only recount the timeline from memory, not provide sources. But iirc, Anonymous was a loose coalition of random people on the internet, some of which turned out to have some basic hacking skills. They weren't really taken seriously until they embarrassed HBGary. At that point, the FBI began investigating them. Anonymous changed their name to LulzSec (or possibly AntiSec). The FBI used standard police techniques to infiltrate and eventually dismantle the those groups. The technique was simply to 1) figure out who was a member of Anonymous, 2) threaten them with prosecution unless they cooperate, 3) repeat. This eventually led them to turn Sabu, Anonymous's leader. I'm going to dig for an interesting HN comment I remember reading about the relationship between FBI, Anonymous, and the takedown of Freedom Hosting.
In order to be friendly to mobile users, I'll copy-paste the comment here (although the link is worth reading because of the informative replies):
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redthrowaway 40 days ago | link | parent | flag
Interesting. Freedom Hosting had been a target of Anonymous' Operation Darknet from the beginning--they're well-known for refusing to take down exploitative sites. Operation Darknet is, itself, a pretty interesting phenomenon: Anonymous hacks onion sites, then hands over user information to the FBI for investigation. Anonymous does what the FBI legally can't, and in exchange they're not prosecuted for it. I can't find the article now, but I recall reading an interview with an FBI agent in Wired or Ars or some such where he described the anons as "Internet Superheroes". (sic)
That, in and of itself, is kind of curious. Curiouser? One of the original Op Darknet principals was Sabu. You may remember him as the hacker the FBI rolled and got to bust up LulzSec. Sabu was turned by the FBI on June 7th, 2011.[1] Operation Darknet began several months later, in October, 2011.[2]
The obvious question, then, is this: Did the FBI use Sabu to entice Anons into attacking child porn networks, thereby evading the laws against them doing it themselves? Did they use the fact they turned a well-known hacktivist to help them deal with criminals they lacked the legal tools to go after? Is this arrest the culmination of those efforts?
LulzSec was not Anonymous. While some of its membership may have overlapped, that doesn't really mean anything, because anyone can be a part of Anonymous, simply by carrying out acts in the group's name.
Sabu forgot to activate TOR before logging into IRC just a single time, and the FBI was able to locate him. Sabu was the legal guardian of his siblings, and was pretty much told that he would never see them again if he didn't cooperate with the feds. And so Sabu became a mole for the FBI, spending the next several months trying to elicit identifiable information from his own crew. For the most part, it worked.
What's interesting is that at least one of his fellow hackers is already out of prison, and the rest are going to be out in a few years. Sabu on the other hand, being a United States citizen, faces much harsher penalties than his European counterparts even though he was the only one with a deal. If I had to guess, best case scenario he is going to be sentenced to 10 years. To be honest though, I wouldn't be surprised if he got a few decades more.
Also, Sabu didn't have to manipulate Anonymous into attacking CP networks. It's something that they do on a semi-regular basis. They did it before Sabu, and they are doing it now.
That's the ask.fm profile of Topiary, the LulzSec leader that spent some time in prison. There's quite a few interesting answers regarding what LulzSec actually was and some of his opinions of Sabu.
Like I said, that's just a guess based both on the severity of his crimes and the tendency of the United States to overreact to anything that involves a computer.
> The FBI used standard police techniques to infiltrate and eventually dismantle the those groups.
Seriously, how do we know the FBI's story isn't "parallel construction"? It always seemed to me that tracking down Anonymous would be easy if you had NSA-scale monitoring. I don't want to sound like paranoid guy, but maybe the FBI's stories about tracking down clues from chat logs are all made up.
Basically, the NSA is suspected to cooperate with other arms of the government, such as the DEA. The NSA supposedly provides information about who is involved in what illegal activity. Apparently this information is provided illegally, without a warrant. So if the DEA gets info from the NSA, the DEA needs to make up a story about how they came to possess that info, since that info was collected illegally without a warrant. That's parallel construction.
I don't know whether NSA would bother with a target like Anonymous, but it's not outside the realm of realistic possibility.
The biggest question is, how did the FBI identify Sabu? He supposedly revealed himself by visiting the website 2600.com, and selling stolen credit cards on Facebook. But how did visiting that website reveal Sabu?
Actually, now that I think about it, the best explanation is probably the simplest: 2600.com probably runs forums, and Sabu probably posted to those forums from his home IP address like an idiot. So the FBI simply demanded his IP address from 2600.com.
I'll look for the article, but as I mentioned above, the way I understand it is that he logged into IRC without using TOR or a VPN one time and they got him.
Lulzsec was a group of people that split from anonymous. They used "AntiSec" as their slogan. Anonymous is still around and often they either disagreed or completely fought against what Lulzsec was doing.
Anonymous itself does not have leadership, it's more of a swarm mentality.
AFTER EDIT: Thanks for your link, which I think came as an edit to your comment. Here is a link to follow-up news:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/22/lulzsec-sa...