LulzSec - 1000th tweet statement
Dear Internets, This is Lulz Security, better known as those evil bastards from twitter. We just hit 1000 tweets, and as such we thought it best to have a little chit-chat with our friends (and foes). For the past month and a bit …
Context & Ripple Effects
LulzSec spent the first half of June 2011 converting notoriety into an operation: confirmed hacks of PBS and Sony by mid-month, a dump of 26,000 porn-site usernames and passwords framed as pure embarrassment, and a declared open conflict against FBI affiliates and whitehat hackers. Two days before this statement it even opened a telephone hack-request line so fans could nominate targets.
The 1,000-tweet milestone is LulzSec pausing to narrate itself — addressing 'friends and foes' directly. That the syndicated pickups led with TechCrunch's 'We Are NOT Attacking Anonymous' and Gizmodo's 'More Sec Than Lulz' shows the statement's real function: managing relationships with both the Anonymous-adjacent crowd and a press corps now treating every Pastebin drop as news.
First-order effects
- The statement publicly denies an attack on Anonymous, drawing a line between LulzSec and the collective whose name it borrows aesthetics from — a distinction its followers and rivals had been collapsing.
- By framing the month of dumps and DoS attacks as a coherent campaign rather than opportunistic breaches, LulzSec consolidates a brand that the request line and Twitter account now feed.
Second-order effects
- Media outlets amplify each statement as primary-source news, which raises LulzSec's target-nomination pipeline value and pressures other crews to match its output cadence.
- Law enforcement and corporate security teams get a public ledger of claimed attacks — PBS, Sony, the porn-site credential dump — effectively handing investigators a self-authored case file.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hacking crews operate as media entities first — Twitter announcements, request lines, Pastebin communiqués — with the intrusion itself becoming secondary to the narrative around it, forcing both press and police to treat social feeds as evidence streams.
The trend: Hacktivism in 2011 is reorganizing around personality-driven crews that broadcast operations on social media in real time, turning breach disclosure into performance and self-documentation.