"While not exactly states, the player-created organizations are large and exert some serious control. They’re also grouped as “corporations” for the smaller ones, and “alliances” for the linkages between them. There’s real money at stake in the game: a player once ran an in-game bank and then left with everything, netting him about $170,000 in real money. In this world, then, it’s not surprising that less-than-honest means of striking at enemies have seen a renaissance."
— At my long-form blog, I examine what we can learn about covert action from how it’s modeled in games.
(Source: kelseydatherton.wordpress.com)
"He refused to make what he called “a moral judgment” of the indicted hackers. “I’ll make a technical judgment,” he told me. “If they were that good, they wouldn’t have got caught."
— David Kushner, in his New Yorker profile of George Hotz, describing Hotz’ reaction to the FBI arrests of key Lulzsec members. (Incidentally, the human intelligence operation behind that bust was discussed in some depth over at Rethinking Security.)
This profile does a neat little trick. It describes a talented young hacker, whose earnest desire to understand and master the technology around him has led to science fair medals, congratulations for Wozniak, and lawsuits from Sony. In the process of describing this young man, the story twists to include a profile of the operational thinking of Anonymous.
Anonymous, by its very nature, is not a directed organization but instead a hive that occasionally moves as a swarm towards a target. Hotz became a cause for anonymous, not because he asked them to, but because they saw in his fight against Sony a symbol to use as a rallying cry. From there, they directed anger into hacks, first at Sony and then elsewhere, mostly like so many tiny monkey wrenches in a giant machine, but occasionally taking personal information of customers. (As an aside: taking down a website is the “tearing down a poster” of hacker attacks.) Here, then, is where not just the law (which had involved since Sony filed suit), but serious law enforcement got involved.
Hotz, as the hacker inadvertently at the center of one of the more significant cybercrimes & busts, weighs in only on the hackers’ technical expertise. Left not discussed is the lack of security utilized by hackers in real life, that most arrestable of arenas.
