Lulzsec and Anonymous Team Against Governments

Hacktivists groups Anonymous and Lulzsec have teamed up to increase their efforts in stealing and leaking classified government information, according to a message poasted by Lulzsec.

Announcing a new campaign called “Operation Anti-Security”,  Lulzsec and Anonymous called on hackers ‘large or small’ to turn their attention on government agencies and to deface government websites with the term ‘AntiSec’, in an announcement made via Pastebin. They did not identify a specific government but did state that banks and ‘other high ranking establishments’ were also in their sights.

Hacktivists group team after Twitter spat

Cyber-attacks have been gaining momentum in recent months and a partnership between the two most vociferous and troublesome groups is likely to result in sleepless nights for IT security professionals around the world.

The partnership comes days after the two groups traded insults via Twitter.

LulzSec has grabbed the headlines of late, claiming responsibility for a series of high profile security breaches including stealing details of more than a million Sony Pictures customers, as well as attacks on Nintendo and the CIA.

Late last year Anonymous rose to prominence by attacking organisations it believed to be co-operating with the US government in censoring Wikileaks, which was releasing stolen diplomatic cables at the time.

While Anonymous’ motives are generally political – attacking PayPal, MasterCard and Visa for disrupting Wikileaks’ funding – Lulzsec claims to be exposing the security shortcomings of large corporations in the name of entertainment and mischief.

Lulzsec, thought to be an offshoot of Anonymous made up of former members, has proven adept at garnering publicity, announcing successful hacks to hundreds of thousands of followers via Twitter and even setting up a telephone hotline for the public to suggest potential targets.

Using Twitter, LulzSec today also offered to help Sega track down the culprits behind a security breach which resulted in the theft of more than a million Sega Pass members’ names, email addresses, dates of birth and passwords.

Sega said payment  information is handled by a third party and so was not compromised.