You probably know Anonymous, that group that in 2003 warned: “We are a legion, we do not forgive, we do not forget, wait for us.” Maybe you also know about LulzSec. But perhaps you have not even heard of a tremendously impressive cyberactivist group: LulzSecPeru.
“They were the only effective hackers -in fact they were incredibly effective – that I was able to find in Latin America”, Frank Jack, a journalist from The Associated Press specializing in cybersecurity, tells the BBC.
He is also the only reporter who communicated directly with the boys who formed LulzSecPeru, in 2003.
“When I asked them why they besieged the Ministry of Defense Argentine, to the Colombian military, to all those networks in which perhaps they had no political interests, they responded: ‘We did it for the Lulz ‘“.
Three years earlier, Wired magazine had given an explanation of what it meant that word in that context:
“The lulz (a deformation of LOL, an abbreviation that is used online to refer to laugh out loud or laugh out loud) is the most important and abstract thing to understand about Anonymous, and perhaps about the internet.
“The lulz laughs instead of yelling. It is a laugh of shame and separation. It is schadenfreude. It is not the anesthetic humor that makes the days go by, it is the humor that enhances the contradictions . The lulz is a laugh with pain. It forces you to consider injustice and hypocrisy, from whatever side you are on at the time.”
Rat and Desh
“When you interviewed To these guys, LulzSecPeru was different from the main hacktivist groups like Anonymous or even the original LulzSec”.
Although they were part of a local version of the LulzSec cyberintruder collective, which grouped the so-called “hackers of black hat”, based in the United States and the United Kingdom, Jack clarifies that they “had no affiliation” with them.
“Those original groups had thousands of active members all over the world, working on different Other projects: protests against the Church of Scientology, support for the Arab Spring, and denial-of-service attacks, also called DoS (for its acronym in English, Denial of Service), consist of attacks on a computer system or network that cause making a service or resource inaccessible to legitimate users—against multiple targets.
“Their huge numbers meant they had a lot of experienced people at their disposal. LulzSecPeru was made up of sóthe two teenagers“.
Identified themselves as @Cyber-Rat, that I had 17 years at the time, and @Desh498, who claimed to have between 23 Y 23 years old and be a university student. They were self-taught programmers who started at the age of 8 and 6, respectively.
According to Rat, his parents had no idea what he was doing.
Dash, for his part, said that his parents knew he was involved in information security and suspected that he could be a hacker, and he believed that sooner or later they would probably find out.
“Rat was more vain and took care of the intrusive work in social networks, to cultivate relationships with other cyberactivists and to publicize the achievements of LulzSecPeru
“Desh was more serious and discreet, and he was the true genius in technological matters”.
Presentation image of LulzSecPeru on Twitter.“At that time, and even now, there was a deep-seated corruption in several South American nations: bribes inde projects d and construction and energy, skimmed from the public treasury, and a lot related to drug trafficking”.
The type of hack they did was cyberactivism par excellence, disruptive, irreverent and with a hint of mischief.
“They started with hundreds of defacements, in which they violated the security of a website and replaced the content with the LulzSec logo , that caricature of a guy with a Dalí-type mustache and a top hat, with a glass of wine in his hand.
“That was just a kind of cover letter, but what What caught my attention was when they
“A) Yes was how they launched themselves onto the scene“.
Furry Peletic Ethics
Although many of his activities were only for the lulz, there was a serious side, the cyberactivist ethic, born from a creed shared by many hackers.
Their philosophy was that anyone who tried to stifle freedom of expression was the enemy and therefore their goal as hackers was to expose abuses of power and encourage transparency by governments.
However, let’s be clear, these were two teenagers, not some white doves.
In the first s days, before fine-tuning their political ideology, they engaged in unethical activities.
In 2012 broke into the network of the company that manages the main domain of Peru and obtained a database of 114. tickets, with names, phone numbers, emails and passwords of affected sites, including banks, security companies, the Google search engine… all domains that ended with “.pe” .
It was the kind of material that criminals dream of having.
And they put it online.
“Desh told me that Rat was the one who did it without consulting him and he told me: ‘I almost killed him that day‘“.
Corruption that corrodes
His most successful hack occurred in 2014, when they turned their attention to the Peruvian government.
“The security of the Peruvian government network was poor. His first big hack had been the Ministry of the Interior of Peru in 2011 and the following year they hacked the Peruvian cyber police, so they were sure that the cyber police knew less about them than they knew about the cyber police.
“This time they set their eyes on the Council’s network of Ministers.
“It took a month to enter, and the result was the publication of approximately 3.500 government emails dating from February to July 2014.
But not great cases of corruption came to light -“the politicians weren’t so stupid”, says Jack-, a lot of everyday, low-level corruption was exposed… the one that corrodes.
“They were damning”.
The public found evidence of lobbyist influence, which generated enormous pressure on some ministers .
The Minister of Energy, in an irritated exchange of emails, impatiently rejected the objections of the Minister of the Environment regarding to his warm relations with an Australian oil company, which insisted that its technicians, not Peruvian environmental regulators, supervise underwater seismic tests.
“It was a particularly explosive case because these tests are used to detect oil deposits, but can harm
In another of the letters, an executive from the lobby of the fishing industry asked the minister of Finance to extend the anchoveta extraction season, which “and It is the most valuable fishing industry in Peru, but also one that is in danger from overfishing“, emphasizes Jack. Shortly after, his wish was granted.
The leaks helped precipitate a motion of censure, to which the government survived thanks to a single vote.
“The scandal that these hackers triggered did not bring down the government, but certainly lo embarrassed“.
Despite the humiliation and some improvements, no matter how hard they tried, the Peruvian cyber police never managed to track down the boys of the top hat.
What happened to them?
Since their online conversations 8 years ago, Jack says he only heard from one of them one more time. “It was a fleeting contact”.
He never had a way to contact them, they were the ones who communicated with him, and in 2013 they both said they were going to start withdrawing .
“Rat said he was about to meet 18 years old, and that when he became an adult, he didn’t want to risk prosecution, so he was going to retire.
“Desh had aspirations to open a portal like WikiLeaks for Latin America, but there is no evidence that this happened. He really wanted to work as a security researcher, and maybe he’s doing that, but I don’t know”.
Cyberactivism is often an activity of young people, partly because they do not face as much risk as adults, but also because they have the time and the drive to do something with the tools they handle.
Also, can fade when it reaches the moment and return to his other life.
“I think LulzSecPeru had its impact and for them that was enough. But I wouldn’t be surprised if others like them emerged at a time of political tension,” concludes Jack.
For 2015, the cyberactivist groups were a shadow of what they had been, but as prototypes – with their tactics, such as hacking and leaking so that others could take advantage of the information — survived.
In 2020 Y 2021 around the world, cyberactivism was revived, with leaks targeting police, takedowns of far-right websites, hacks constantly undermining the Lukashenko’s surveillance state in Belarus, among others.
This is cyberactivism: intense and intermittent.
We don’t know where or when it will arise, but what is striking is how few hackers can shake those in positions of power that they believe themselves irreproachable.
This article is an adaptation of the episode “For the Lulz” of the BBC series “The Hackers” presented by digital anthropologist Gabriella Coleman.
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