Fraud starts after Lulzsec group releases e-mail, passwords

17.06.2011
Debbie Crowell never ordered the iPhone, but thanks to a hacking group known as Lulzsec, she spent a good part of her Thursday morning trying to get US$712.00 in charges reversed after someone broke into her Amazon account and ordered it.

"They even had me pay for one-day shipping," she said via e-mail Thursday afternoon.

Crowell is one of more than 62,000 people who must now change passwords and keep a close eye on their online accounts after Lulzsec posted their Thursday. It's the latest escalation in a messy hacking rampage by the anarchic group that's caused damage at Sony, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service and even the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

It's not clear where all of the Lulzsec e-mail addresses and passwords came from. At least 12,000 of them, including Crowell's, were gathered from Writerspace.com, a discussion forum for readers and writers of mystery and romance novels. The site's technical staff is trying to figure out how they were stolen and is in the process of contacting victims, said Writerspace owner Cissy Hartley.

The 62,000 e-mail addresses and passwords belong to victims at large companies such as IBM, as well as in state and federal government. Affected agencies include the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Unlike other hacking groups, Lulzsec doesn't seem to have much of an agenda, except to settle a few scores and cause as much chaos as possible. Lulz is hacker speak for the plural of "laugh out loud."