A few weeks back, I commented in passing on the devastating attack recently directed by hivemind group Anonymous against internet security firm HBGary.
Despite that stinging humiliation, HBGary planned to go ahead with a presentation it was scheduled to deliver at a major security conference — until the presentation team arrived to find a sign in their booth reading, “Anon . . . In it 4 The Lulz.”
At that point, the team packed up and left, complaining, “They decided to follow us to a public place where we were to do business and make a public mockery of our company.”
Mission accomplished, at least as far as Anonymous was concerned. But I’ve been wondering ever since about that mocking sign and the strangely cryptic word “Lulz.”
For those who are just coming in on the story, Lulz is a noun derived from the exclamation LOL — as in lolcat — which is, in turn, an internet acronym for Laughing Out Loud. If you look it up in online dictionaries, you’ll find doing something “for the lulz” defined at doing it for laughs, often at someone else’s expense.
But although saying “I did it for the lulz” can certainly be used to justify bad behavior, its application to the HBGary situation suggests something deeper.