LulzSec opens hack request line
Lulz Security's request line features the voice of Pierre Dubois - possibly the name of its comic icon — The hacker group Lulz Security has opened a telephone request line so its fans can suggest potential targets. — It claims to have launched denial …
Context & Ripple Effects
Lulz Security spent the first half of June escalating on two fronts at once: it declared open war on FBI affiliates and whitehat hackers in early June, then followed with the dump of 26,000 porn site usernames and passwords chosen explicitly for embarrassment value. High-profile hits on PBS and Sony had already made the group a media property rather than an anonymous crew.
The request line is the next step in that arc: having built an audience, LulzSec is now outsourcing target selection to it, with a phone line voiced by 'Pierre Dubois' — likely the group's comic persona — collecting suggestions from fans. It turns target choice into participatory entertainment while the group keeps claiming denial-of-service attacks against whatever rises up the list.
First-order effects
- Anyone publicly suggested through the line becomes a plausible LulzSec target, effectively letting the group's fanbase nominate victims for denial-of-service attacks the group says it is already conducting.
- Law enforcement and the whitehat community LulzSec declared war on earlier in June gain a fixed public artifact — the line itself — that documents solicitation of hacking rather than just its aftermath.
Second-order effects
- Companies that might previously have assumed obscurity offers safety now face an adversarial audience actively nominating them, raising the incentive to harden systems and monitor LulzSec's channels directly.
- Rival hacker crews and whitehats, already in declared conflict with the group, get a crowdsourced signal of where LulzSec is heading next, sharpening the doxing-and-retaliation cycle between factions.
Third-order effects
- If crowdsourcing target selection sustains engagement, hacktivism drifts further toward an attention-economy model where audience participation, not technical capability, becomes the scarce resource a group like LulzSec optimizes for.
- A pattern of openly soliciting attacks would push regulators and prosecutors toward treating facilitation and audience-building around hacking as prosecutable conduct distinct from the intrusions themselves.
The trend: Hacktivism is evolving from small crews executing their own operations into participatory spectacles where audiences help select targets and amplify each strike.