After declaring war against all governments Sunday night in Operation Anti-Security (#AntiSec), hacktivist group LulzSec has spent all Tuesday morning in a battle repudiating various media claims, coincidentally all UK related.
In response to reports that one of their own was arrested by Scotland Yard in Essex, UK, the hacker group has tweeted, “Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it’s all over now… wait… we’re all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?”
The group then countered the specific claim that the suspect, Essex nineteen year old Ryan Cleary, is involved with LulzSec with “Ryan Cleary is not part of LulzSec; we house one of our many legitimate chatrooms on his IRC server, but that’s it,” from the group’s official Twitter account.
“Clearly the UK police are so desperate to catch us that they’ve gone and arrested someone who is, at best, mildly associated with us. Lame.,” the account went on.
Apparently Cleary’s server is host to some of LulzSec’s IRC chatrooms but he himself isn’t a member according to the group. The UK Guardian has also compiled what it claims to be a list of LulzSec members with no mention of Cleary.
There’s also no word on whether Cleary’s arrest was related to an alleged hack of the UK census, which was posted on Pastebin with the same ASCII art and format as other LulzSec hacks. The @LulSec Twitter account, which must be getting tired of this, denied involvement with that one as well, “Just saw the pastebin of the UK census hack. That wasn’t us – don’t believe fake LulzSec releases unless we put out a tweet first.” Thus far proof of the legitimacy of that attack has not surfaced.
“People should keep releasing fake LulzSec stuff. It helps filter out the peon masses from the respectable, fact-checking media outlets,” the group said on Twitter. Thus far Lulzsec has taken credit for attacks on PBS, Sony, the FBI, Senate.gov, the CIA and the online games EVE, Minecraft, League of Legends and more so granted it’s a little hard to keep track.
Word to media outlets reporting on this: When in doubt, check the @lulzsec Twitter account.