Hacking group LulzSec folds before detection

The infamous hactivist collective LulzSec has announced that itis disbanding after just 50 days of generating worldwide headlineswith a string of cyber attacks.

The move comes amid growing international police investigationsinto the hacking group and was announced hours after rival hackersclaimed to have unmasked LulzSec's leaders.

Over the past two months LulzSec has been responsible for astring of disruptive attacks on a host of websites, including theCIA, Nintendo, Sony Pictures and the Arizona Police Department.

The group started off claiming its hacks were done purely for funand to highlight poor cyber security. But in recent weeks it becameincreasingly political, targeting a slew of government websites andannouncing an alliance with its one-time rival hactivist groupAnonymous.

In a final hurrah LulzSec posted its last information dump - acache of hacked data from a variety of organisations includingnames, emails and passwords of thousands of online gamers. Thecache, posted online, also included internal documents from USmobile network operator AT&T.

In a resignation statement peppered with its trademark nauticalreferences, LulzSec made no mention of why it was disbanding. "Ourplanned 50-day cruise has expired," the statement, posted throughLulzSec's official Twitter page, read. "We must now sail into thedistance, leaving behind - we hope - inspiration, fear, denial,happiness, approval, disapproval, mockery, embarrassment,thoughtfulness, jealousy, hate, even love. If anything, we hope wehad a microscopic impact on someone, somewhere."

The announcement came as a surprise to many online followers.Only last week LulzSec were boasting that they intended to publishdetails of new hacks today, and follow up with further releasesevery subsequent Friday. Rival hackers and commentators believe thegroup's leaders may have decided to go to ground fearing lawenforcement agents were closing in.

"Inevitably there will be speculation that the reason forLulzSec's apparent disbandment could be that they are worried thatthey have brought too much attention to themselves," Graham Cluley,a cyber security expert at Sophos, said. "The temptation for someoneconnected with the group to blab about their involvement may be toogreat, and the chances of a member of LulzSec being careless andunwittingly failing to cover their tracks could be too big a risk totake."

Over the weekend a string of rival hackers posted their owndocument dumps detailing who they believed to be some of LulzSec'skey leaders. Those named as members were said to be from the US,Sweden and Britain.

One group, calling itself the A-Team, posted what they claimedwas a full list of member details including logs from online chatconversations and offered to hand them over to the FBI. The A-Teamsaid LulzSec members felt they were protected by a "culture builtaround the anonymity of the internet".

But they added: "The internet by definition is not anonymous.Computers have to have attribution. If you trace something back farenough you can find its origins."

Although LulzSec generated unprecedented media coverage for thecyber assaults, they were criticised by the underground hackingscene, who wrote their work off as comparatively simple hacking anddisruption techniques using other hacker's coding.

In its parting statement, LulzSec called on supporters to throwtheir weight behind Anonymous, the much larger hactivist networkwhere many of the LulzSec leaders used to operate, and the so-called Anti-Sec movement - a term used by hacktivists to describetheir anti-government, anti-authoritarian cyber protests.