Jake Leslie Davis (born 27 October 1992), [1] best known by his online pseudonym Topiary, is a British hacktivist. He has worked with Anonymous, LulzSec, and other similar groups. [2] He was an associate of the Internet group Anonymous, [3] which has publicly claimed various online attacks, including hacking HBGary, [4] Westboro Baptist Church, and Gawker. [5] They have also claimed responsibility for the defacing of government websites in countries such as Zimbabwe, [6] Syria, [7] Tunisia, [8] Ireland, [9] and Egypt. [10]
After serving his time and staying off the Internet for two years, Jake Davis is now a security researcher, disclosing bugs to corporations as a part of their bounty programs.
Davis was a member of hacker collective Anonymous, [3] where he was involved in the attack on HBGary in response to Aaron Barr, then CEO of the organization, claiming to have unmasked various members of Anonymous. [4] The stolen HBGary emails were published and the small team who had been responsible splintered from Anonymous calling itself LulzSec.
On 24 February 2011, Topiary gained attention after he appeared on The David Pakman Show . He informed the host that Anonymous had replaced a Westboro Baptist Church webpage with a message from Anonymous during an on-air confrontation with Shirley Phelps-Roper. [11] A recording of this event was placed on YouTube, [12] where it reached over one million views in five days.
Topiary was a member of LulzSec, and ran their Twitter account. [13] [14] The Guardian made a claim in a report that Topiary's name was Daniel. [15]
On 14 July 2011, The Guardian published an exclusive interview with Topiary, [16] in which he spoke extensively about his motivations. Describing himself as "an internet denizen with a passion for change" he said he feared being tracked by the authorities: "I can only hope that they haven't pinned any of us, especially my friends from LulzSec." Later, a full transcript of the lengthy interview surfaced on the website of freelance Guardian journalist Ryan Gallagher. [17]
An 18-year-old man suspected of being Topiary was arrested in the Shetland islands of Scotland on 27 July 2011. [18] On 31 July 2011, the man was charged with five offences including unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a distributed denial of service attack on the Serious Organised Crime Agency's website. [19] Scotland Yard later identified the man arrested as Jake Davis, a resident of the island of Yell. [20] He was charged with unauthorised access of a computer under the Computer Misuse Act 1990, encouraging or assisting criminal activity under the Serious Crime Act 2007, conspiracy to launch a denial-of-service attack against the Serious Organised Crime Unit contrary to the Criminal Law Act 1977, and criminal conspiracy also under the Criminal Law Act 1977. [21]
Police confiscated a Dell laptop and a 100-gigabyte hard drive that had 16 different virtual machines. The hard drive also contained details relating to an attack on Sony and hundreds of thousands of email addresses and passwords. [22] A London court released Davis on bail under the conditions that he live under curfew with his mother and have no access to the Internet. His lawyer Gideon Cammerman stated that, while his client did help publicise LulzSec and Anonymous attacks, he lacked the technical skills to have been anything but a sympathiser. [22]
After his arrest, Anonymous launched a 'Free Topiary' campaign, [23] which included adding a "Free Topiary" banner to their Twitter avatars, similar to the Free Bradley banner.
Davis pleaded guilty on 25 June 2012 to DDoS attacks on several websites, but pleaded not guilty to two counts of encouraging others to commit computer offenses and fraud. Davis was due to be tried along with Ryan Cleary (Ryan), Ryan Ackroyd (Kayla), Mustafa Al-Bassam (tflow), beginning 8 April 2013. The court was informed it would take 3,000 hours to view the material against Ackroyd alone. They were released on bail, except for Cleary. [24] [25]
Davis was not tried for a number of other crimes perpetrated by LulzSec.
On 8 April 2013, Davis again appeared in court with fellow hackers, Ryan Ackroyd, Ryan Cleary and Mustafa Al-Bassam. All four pleaded guilty to computer crimes and were sentenced on 14 May 2013. Davis faced a maximum of 10 years in prison but got 24 months in a young offenders institute. He served 38 days because he had been electronically tagged for 21 months and this counted against his sentence. [26]
Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.
InfraGard is a national non-profit organization serving as a public-private partnership between U.S. businesses and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The organization is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests, and combining the knowledge base of, a wide range of private sector and government members. InfraGard is an association of individuals that facilitates information sharing and intelligence between businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to preventing hostile acts against the United States.
The David Pakman Show(TDPS), originally Midweek Politics with David Pakman, is a progressive news talk show currently airing on television, radio, and the Internet, hosted by David Pakman.
Jeremy Hammond, alias sup_g, is an American anarchist activist and former computer hacker from Chicago. He founded the computer security training website HackThisSite in 2003. He was first imprisoned over the Protest Warrior hack in 2005 and was later convicted of computer fraud in 2013 for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing data to WikiLeaks, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Michael Gregory Hoglund is an American author, researcher, and serial entrepreneur in the cyber security industry. He is the founder of several companies, including Cenzic, HBGary and Outlier Security. Hoglund contributed early research to the field of rootkits, software exploitation, buffer overflows, and online game hacking. His later work focused on computer forensics, physical memory forensics, malware detection, and attribution of hackers. He holds a patent on fault injection methods for software testing, and fuzzy hashing for computer forensics. Due to an email leak in 2011, Hoglund is well known to have worked for the U.S. Government and Intelligence Community in the development of rootkits and exploit material. It was also shown that he and his team at HBGary had performed a great deal of research on Chinese Government hackers commonly known as APT. For a time, his company HBGary was the target of a great deal of media coverage and controversy following the 2011 email leak. HBGary was later acquired by a large defense contractor.
Encyclopedia Dramatica is a satirical online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". The site hosts racist material and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google Search in 2010. An administrator of the website was the perpetrator of the 2017 Aztec High School shooting, and users of the site frequently participate in harassment campaigns.
The Jester is a self-identified grey hat hacktivist. He claims to be responsible for attacks on WikiLeaks and Islamist websites. He claims to be acting out of American patriotism.
LulzSec was a black hat computer hacking group that claimed responsibility for several high profile attacks, including the compromise of user accounts from PlayStation Network in 2011. The group also claimed responsibility for taking the CIA website offline. Some security professionals have commented that LulzSec has drawn attention to insecure systems and the dangers of password reuse. It has gained attention due to its high profile targets and the sarcastic messages it has posted in the aftermath of its attacks. One of the founders of LulzSec was computer security specialist Hector Monsegur, who used the online moniker Sabu. He later helped law enforcement track down other members of the organization as part of a plea deal. At least four associates of LulzSec were arrested in March 2012 as part of this investigation. Prior, British authorities had announced the arrests of two teenagers they alleged were LulzSec members, going by the pseudonyms T-flow and Topiary.
Operation Anti-Security, also referred to as Operation AntiSec or #AntiSec, is a series of hacking attacks performed by members of the hacking group LulzSec and Anonymous, and others inspired by the announcement of the operation. LulzSec performed the earliest attacks of the operation, with the first against the Serious Organised Crime Agency on 20 June 2011. Soon after, the group released information taken from the servers of the Arizona Department of Public Safety; Anonymous would later release information from the same agency two more times. An offshoot of the group calling themselves LulzSecBrazil launched attacks on numerous websites belonging to the Government of Brazil and the energy company Petrobras. LulzSec claimed to retire as a group, but on 18 July they reconvened to hack into the websites of British newspapers The Sun and The Times, posting a fake news story of the death of the publication's owner Rupert Murdoch.
Hector Xavier Monsegur, known also by the online pseudonym Sabu, is an American computer hacker and co-founder of the hacking group LulzSec. Monsegur became an informant for the FBI, working with the agency for over ten months to aid them in identifying the other hackers from LulzSec and related groups while facing a sentence of 124 years in prison. LulzSec intervened in the affairs of organizations such as News Corporation, Stratfor, UK and American law enforcement bodies and Irish political party Fine Gael.
Anonymous is a decentralized virtual community. They are commonly referred to as an internet-based collective of hacktivists whose goals, like its organization, are decentralized. Anonymous seeks mass awareness and revolution against what the organization perceives as corrupt entities, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Anonymous has had a hacktivist impact. This is a timeline of activities reported to be carried out by the group.
Parmy Olson is a tech journalist for The Wall Street Journal. While at Forbes, she was known for her work on the hacktivist movement Anonymous. She describes herself as covering "agitators and innovators in mobile".
Mustafa Al-Bassam is an Iraqi- British computer security researcher, hacker, and co-founder of Celestia Labs. Al-Bassam co-founded the hacker group LulzSec in 2011, which was responsible for several high profile breaches. He later went on to co-found Chainspace, a company implementing a smart contract platform, which was acquired by Facebook in 2019. In 2021, Al-Bassam graduated from University College London, completing a PhD in computer science with a thesis on Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam as one of the 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs in technology.
Ryan Ackroyd, a.k.a.Kayla and also lolspoon, is a former black hat hacker who was one of the six core members of the computer hacking group "LulzSec" during its 50-day spree of attacks from 6 May 2011 until 26 June 2011. Throughout the time, Ackroyd posed as a female hacker named "Kayla" and was responsible for the penetration of multiple military and government domains and many high profile intrusions into the networks of Gawker in December 2010, HBGaryFederal in 2011, PBS, Sony, Infragard Atlanta, Fox Entertainment and others. He eventually served 30 months in prison for his hacking activities.
Austin Thompson, known as DerpTrolling, is a hacker that was active from 2011 to 2014. He largely used Twitter to coordinate distributed denial of service attacks on various high traffic websites. In December 2013 he managed to bring down large gaming sites such as League of Legends in an attempt to troll popular livestreamer PhantomL0rd. Public reaction to his presence has been generally negative, largely owing to the unclear nature of his motives.
On March 27, 2016, hackers under the banner "Anonymous Philippines" hacked into the website of the Philippine Commission on Elections (COMELEC) and defaced it. The hackers left a message calling for tighter security measures on the vote counting machines (VCM) to be used during the 2016 Philippine general election on May 9. Within the day a separate group of hackers, LulzSec Pilipinas posted an online link to what it claims to be the entire database of COMELEC and updated the post to include three mirror link to the index of the database's downloadable files. The leaked files by LulzSec Pilipinas amounts to 340 gigabytes.
Karen Elizabeth Todner is a British solicitor. Her clients include hacker Ryan Cleary linked with LulzSec, Gary McKinnon known as the "Pentagon Hacker", and Lauri Love.
Hack Forums is an Internet forum dedicated to discussions related to hacker culture and computer security. The website ranks as the number one website in the "Hacking" category in terms of web-traffic by the analysis company Alexa Internet. The website has been widely reported as facilitating online criminal activity, such as the case of Zachary Shames, who was arrested for selling keylogging software on Hack Forums in 2013 which was used to steal personal information.
Westboro Baptist Church carries out daily picketing in Topeka, Kansas and travels nationally to picket the funerals of gay victims of murder or gay-bashing, as well as those of people who have died from complications related to AIDS. It also pickets other events related or peripherally related to homosexuality. It is the protesting of military funerals that led to the organization receiving much attention for its small size. Protests done by Westboro Baptist Church are characterized by defacement of the American flag, hate speech said by members to onlookers, and members holding signs with predominantly homophobic and anti-American statements.