Paul Carr is somewhat dismissive of the hacking exploits of the LulzSec group:
For the past few weeks, a hacker collective called LulzSec has been leading American and British authorities a merry dance. The group’s targets are seemingly random – Sony, the CIA, contestants of a reality TV show, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) – but their stated motive has remained constant: “we’re doing it for laughs”, or, to put it in internet parlance, “lulz”.
If one is to believe the media coverage – particularly here in the US‚ no one is safe from the ingenious hackers and their devilishly complex attacks. The truth is, there’s almost nothing ingenious about what LulzSec is doing: CIA and Soca were not “hacked” in any meaningful sense, rather their public websites were brought down by an avalanche of traffic — a so-called “distributed denial-of-service” (DDoS) attack. Given enough internet-enabled typewriters, a mentally subnormal monkey could launch a DDoS attack — except that mentally subnormal monkeys have better things to do with their time.
Even the genuine hacks are barely worthy of the word. Many large organisations use databases with known security holes that can easily be exploited by anyone who has recently completed the first year of a computer science degree: it’s no coincidence that so many of these hacker collectives appear towards the end of the academic year.
