After FBI agents raided a home in Hamilton, Ohio on Monday, it came out that they were searching for a hacker associated with Lulz Security, the hactivist collective that disbanded last weekend after a 50-day campaign of mischief. The raid comes as flickers of tension and infighting among the group's former members have surfaced publicly online. It also follows the arrest and subsequent release on bail of a teenager said to be a key member of LulzSec, but whom the group says was "at best, a mild associate." Meanwhile, LulzSec itself has tried to out some of its former members who it says wronged it, while others online try to identify the group's key players. In other words: LulzSec's enemies are becoming a problem. The story lines of the group's many detractors are a bit tricky to unravel, but here's a partial list of outside enemies trying to expose LulzSec members as well as insiders who have turned on them:
The Jester: Known on Twitter as @th3J35t3r, he is a former military hacker who has been feuding with LulzSec on Twitter since the group first became active. Last week, the Jester claimed on Twitter to have outed the group in a pastebin posting. He also has a Wordpress blog where he details evidence of the identities of its members. He works alone and LulzSec hates his guts. The group posted a screed against him on Pastebin before it ceased operation. The Jester usually targets higher-profile terrorists, and is suspected in yesterday's takedown of al Qaeda's Web site.
The A-Team: This group of hackers made its debut this week when it published a large Pastebin post on Sunday, claiming to name members of LulzSec. So far, only one of those supposed LulzSec members has been raided, that we know of, and that raid happened before the A-Team's post. Laurelai Bailey, a 29-year-old from Davenport, Iowa, told Gawker's Adrian Chen this week that FBI members had raided her home last Thursday in a bid to get more information on LulzSec's members.
"They wanted to know if I could get close to them," Bailey says. "I told them these people hate me... it wouldn't do any good." Bailey says Lulz Security hackers hold a grudge against her for leaking logs from the secret chat room in which they planned the HBGary hack—which she says she did in retaliation for them harassing some of her friends.
Web Ninjas: This group doesn't want you to call them hackers. Per their blog, LulzSec Exposed, they're "cyber vigilantes." They've mostly focused on trying to make the case that Laurelai (who says on her own Twitter feed that she's transgendered), is a man named Steven Lacey, who lives in Ireland.
M_nerva and hann: Former LulzSec associates, these two raised the group's ire early on by leaking chat logs that eventually found their way to the pages of The Guardian. In response, LulzSec itself leaked their identities in a Pastebin post. M_nerva's address is listed in Hamilton, Ohio, so it seems like a good bet that that's where the FBI got the tip that led to this week's raid.
4Chan: The anarchic /b/ message board (NSFW) on 4Chan got really steamed at LulzSec for shutting down a few gaming sites earlier this month. Its members vowed to find the culprits and track them down, but the only person they "exposed," William Davis, turned out to be a Web editor for the Bangor Daily News. We talked to him and he was a very nice guy who said he had nothing to do with LulzSec or Anonymous.
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