By Salvador Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times –
LOS ANGELES —The hacker group known as LulzSec appears to be back after many months of laying low, claiming to have exposed the accounts of nearly 171,000 members of the military.
The group, which in 2011 went after government agencies and companies including the FBI, CIA, Sony and the Public Broadcasting Service, claims to have exposed the email accounts of thousands of members on the website MilitarySingles.com.
“There are emails such as @us.army.mil; @carney.navy.mil; @greatlakes.cnet.navy.mil; @microsoft.com; etc.,” the group said in a note posted on the website PasteBin.
The group said it dumped a database including a total of 170,937 email accounts from the website, which bills itself as “the dating site for single soldiers.”
The Pentagon could not be reached for comment about the severity of the database dump.
After a busy summer of 2011, LulzSec has not posted on its Twitter account since late July, and since then, some members of the group have been arrested.
The latest posts came from a different account, with the handle @lulzboatR and name “LulzSec Reborn.”
The account began posting again March 8, and posted a YouTube video titled “Lulz Security is reborn!,” which plays a pirate song.
LulzSec began as a group of hackers that were originally part of the decentralized Internet group Anonymous. The original members of LulzSec claimed they went after companies and organizations to expose security holes and, of course, for the “lulz,” or for kicks or giggles.
