LulzSec Leader Holds Onto Sun Email

The 4GB worth of email stolen by the LulzSec hacking group from The Sun earlier this year are sitting on a server in China, according to “Sabu,” the outfit’s alleged leader.

“We got them stashed on a Chinese storage server. Alongside the dumps of a whole bunch of hits we did,” Sabu said during a question and answer session held on Reddit this weekend.

LulzSec kept corporate IT security departments on their toes for weeks back in May and June when the group randomly attacked many companies for fun.

The hacking group said they disbanded on June 26, after 50 days of mayhem that left thousands of innocent users with their personal information and passwords exposed, only to re-emerge a month later.

On July 18, at a time when new revelations were being made in the News of the World phone hacking case, LulzSec attacked its sister publication, The Sun. The hackers managed to post a fake story on the newspaper’s website and claimed to have copied its email database.

The group originally intended to publish the email, but later decided against it, allegedly because they could have badly affected the court case against those involved in the scandal. It’s not clear if the messages will be released when the case is over and who else except Sabu has access to them.

For a while LulzSec seemed to be one step ahead of the authorities, its members apparently confident that they couldn’t get caught. However, several people associated with the group were eventually identified and arrested.

Such was the case with Jake Davis, an 18-year-old teenager from the U.K., who used the online alias “Topiary” and played a spokesperson role within LulzSec and Anonymous. “I miss Topiary. We became brothers,” said Sabu during the Reddit Q&A session. “Lost too many friends. Will probably never talk to them ever again,” he added.

Last month the FBI arrested a 23-year-old man from Tempe, Arizona, named Cody Kretsinger who is believed to be a former LulzSec member known as “recursion.” Sabu claims that arresting recursion was probably the closest authorities got to him.

It’s not clear if by closest he refers to his location or to information that could lead to him being caught. He remains defiant and doesn’t believe that the FBI can catch him without help.

“The ironic twist will be that my own friends will take me down and not these idiots who hide behind the patriot veil,” the hacker said. However, despite the very real possibility that his former hacking mates will expose him, Sabu doesn’t plan to stop hacking or go into hiding. “I’m at the point of no return. Not trying to sound like a bad ass, however, it’s the truth,” he concluded.