Hackers on Steroids Read online

  These RIP trolls band together under recognised pseudonyms and find and suggest RIP pages or other groups to hit. They will scour the news to find tragedies and then look for memorial pages in relation to those deaths. If they can’t find one, many times they’ll make their own to draw unsuspecting people in, with the reverberations of this oftentimes carrying as far as the families of the deceased targets. Sometimes they will branch out and hit pages that seek help for seriously ill children, or support groups for mothers who have lost babies. At times they will even organise to flood children’s websites with bestiality and hardcore straight and gay pornography. The same psychotics also delight in finding vulnerable people to conduct sustained bullying campaigns against, bullying campaigns that can sometimes go on for years. It is a ‘no limits’ cult that has the temple of its lore on the utterly witless abomination of a website which is Encyclopedia Dramatica, and its roots in the free-for-all ‘/b/’ or ‘Random’ board of the user-generated website 4Chan.org. This is a board that some in the media like to talk up as some radical and free-spirited humour page but which in reality is - for the most part - nothing more than a haven for clueless kids, unfunny cretins, violent psychopaths, and salivating paedophiles. It truly is the cancer spreading to the rest of the Internet.

  RIP trolls are as banal, stupid, ridiculous, mad, bad, sociopathic, and miserable as you would expect. I have looked deep into the black pit that is their collective and it will come as no surprise to the reader to learn that they are, in stark contrast to their brilliantly deluded view of themselves as savvy underworld masterminds, a ‘community’ which as a general rule attracts into its ranks only the most base of individuals: chronic alcoholics and drug addicts; racist street thugs with subnormal intelligence; deeply depressed, dead-eyed college students with zero social skills and disturbing obsessions; paedophiles and other makes of depraved perverts; low-level criminals of the most pathetic kind, along with other lowlife flotsam and jetsam who are to be found floating on the Internet’s high seas. Many are narcissistic. All could be said to be misanthropic. They are the excrement in the toilet of life and for a while I and some online acquaintances tried to act as the flush handle on that same toilet.

  And who am I? I am nobody, really. I am an at least half-mad Irishman (well, if I wasn’t half crazy when I started all of this, then I probably am now) of no importance. I am merely a narrator and documenter of certain things that have taken place, the veracity of much of which can be checked through media reports. My name is Oisín (pronounced Oh-sheen) and I live quite a boring existence, far too much of which is spent online. Oh, and I hate RIP trolls, many of whom in turn hate me with a vengeance, something which amuses me immensely.

  After some days then of sifting through their vileness and having made a number of unsuccessful attempts to interest the main UK national dailies in what was going on, I decided that the best course of action for my sanity would be to look away and to try and forget what I had seen happening. Dealing with one of these disgusting beings was one thing, but this was all too much. I had been lying awake at night thinking about it, feeling the utter hatred boiling in me, wanting to lock them all in a barn and burn it. I realised that I had been shocked by what I had witnessed going on and that in turn that shock was creating very many bad feelings in me, all of which were doing no harm to anyone except to my own self. So look away I did, putting it slowly out of my head over the course of the next week. In mid-December though I began thinking of it again and decided to have another look at this digital monstrosity. What I saw then was something so unspeakably depraved that it disturbed me even more than the Megan Moore trolling.

  My return to this netherworld had coincided with the sexually-motivated murder of Millie Martin, a 15-month-old girl from my own country. Her killing was being widely reported on in the Irish media, and I remember well the little toddler’s face being shown on the headline news. The creatures of the night that were this crowd of trolls had also picked up a news report about her murder and were inspired by it to set about making groups celebrating her sexual abuse and subsequent death. Trolls with fake names like ‘Dale Angerer’ - a child pornography fan from Australia later to become infamous as the first individual jailed for trolling; ‘Prince Az Lives’ - a father of three in his late 30s who works as a handyman for a Lord in Yorkshire, England, and whose full identity is known to me; and ‘Vicky Edward’ - an exceptionally depraved husband and wife trolling team with the surname Martel, originally from the UK but now living in France and that can still be seen on Facebook to this day writing their sexual fantasies under the photographs of children, were spewing out unspeakable sexual slurs about the little child. One of them, an admitted paedophile who trolled for a long time under the pseudonym ‘Frankie Desmond,’ even posted on one of the groups a pornographic photograph of a baby girl’s genitals. The actual picture I did not see, having arrived on the page only after he had taken the image down, but I have the outrage caused by it captured in a screengrab, and was told by two witnesses as to what he had done. The next day, the Belfast Telegraph reported on what was going on and under a link to their online version of the story I observed some of those trolls conveying a genuine ecstasy that what they had done had made the papers and so caused even more distress to the tot’s family.

  ‘Prince Az,’ who was also trolling on these groups as ‘Luciano Pavaroti’ and whose real initials are RC, said that he was ‘so very, very happy’ at the reporting of this in a newspaper. The same creep some two years later took a mental breakdown when he was almost exposed in a national British newspaper for his years of sadistic harassment against bereaved people (he especially liked to target the mothers of dead babies and toddlers). This loathsome little toad, who begged and pleaded with me and offered to rat on all the rest of the trolls so as not to be exposed, was only saved from appearing in the newspaper by the very skin of his teeth (and certainly not because of his pleading). Nevertheless, it all caused him some severe mental and emotional anguish and fear in his real life, something that made me so very, very happy.

  A blackness followed me through the days ahead as I delved deeper and deeper into their dark pool. I wanted to find out the identities of all of them and expose them to their families, to their victims, to the world. I trawled through as many of their open profiles as I could, searching for little clues as to their real-life details. After a couple of days I was eventually then able to get the real info - or ‘dox’* - on a troll who was using the name and photograph of the actor Steven Buscemi. I was led to his real-life account after seeing an old posting he had made on a female troll’s wall about how he had started out by trolling with his real Facebook profile on a page about a restaurant, which he helpfully named. He was a 19-year-old from Minnesota with the initials CS and he had been very active in the Megan Moore trolling, even sending out a ‘troll alert’ as he called it for other trolls to come and desecrate the page. Finding his real profile on that named page I then fooled my way onto it via the use of a fake account of my own, and after satisfying myself that he was the troll I took all of his details - from his small town to his two email addresses - and made a page outing him as someone who happily boasts of his sexual appetite for children. The link to my open page I then spammed all over any Facebook group I could find related to his home town. Maybe he has a real sexual appetite for children, maybe he doesn’t. But that’s what he claimed on the countless RIP pages he attacked, and if it was a joke then I wasn’t laughing. I didn’t label him as a paedophile, just simply crucified him with his own nails. Let the cunt explain his ‘jokes’ to those who know him in real life.

  *Internet slang for finding the real name, location, picture, and other such personal details of an up-until-then anonymous citizen of the Web, and derived from an incident in which a hacker placed someone’s private documents - or ’docs’ - onto 4Chan

  So I had found myself acting as some sort of online vigilante on his own stupid crusade. Part of why I was doing this was to visi
t some sort of retribution onto the heads of the guilty, part of it was to show the other trolls that it could come into their real lives. But mostly it was to vent my intense hatred of what they were doing.

  Someone linked my page to the trolls and they subsequently flooded it with bleating and complaints, leading soon to warnings and threats. CS himself came on from his real and troll accounts to admit he was the troll, but expressing outrage that I was misrepresenting his comedy genius. Unbelievably, after all they had done and were doing, I got a sense from them that they were genuinely feeling that they were being picked on by me, that one of their number was having a terrible injustice done to him. This was a baffling pattern that I was to see again and again from these shameless little entities, something which must betray real personality disorders and the sense of completely skewed realities. After my doxing of Sean Duffy I had messaged many of his friends on Facebook and told them about what he was doing. This, I later learned, led to him actually contacting the police and a team of solicitors to make a complaint about me, telling them that an awful online bully was causing him to become suicidal.* My mind was completely blown.

  *But not suicidal enough in my opinion

  The trolls here were threatening me with something called ‘Anonymous,’ a group of hackers apparently and whom they were claiming could get inside anyone’s computer and ruin anyone’s life. A quick Google search for this group seemed to prove its existence, and I spent all of that night lying awake in a sweat wondering just what the hell I had gotten myself into. I tossed and turned in the dark all night, unable to sleep with worry at what was coming for me though the phone cables that reached into my house. I had visions of some gang of uber-nerds sitting in a basement in New York reaching their digital hands into my computer, pulling out my own ‘dox’ and then mercilessly going to work on it.

  Eventually, come six o’clock in the morning and still having slept none, I jumped out of bed, ran into my living room, switched on the computer and deleted my outing page along with the account that went with it, one ‘Billy Gruff.’ After much torturous debate with myself as to the rights and wrongs of backing down from such evil, panic had overtaken me and I reasoned with myself that I would still try to do something, but not that. I would try again to get some media interested, maybe even American media. But I was never going up directly against this ‘Anonymous’ again!

  I laugh at that now. I was an innocent then taking his first steps into a bigger world full of unknown terrors. Yes, there is a group/movement/idea/cult/whatever known as Anonymous, and yes it is responsible for all sorts of computer attacks and even real cyber-hacks, but the good news is that even though that many of the Internet’s RIP trolls may style themselves as ‘Anonymous,’ all is not as it seems. A somewhat tangled subject of which I will return to in more detail later. But here now is basically all that you need to know - the Anonymous which has been making the headlines worldwide for their organised attacks on computer systems and their hacking into police emails are very unlikely to be the same individuals as are in the RIP trolling gangs, some of whose members also wear that now familiar Guy Fawkes mask, symbol of that ‘movement.’ If this were not so, then I and others would probably have had some conflict with them by now.

  So for the next two or three months I dipped in and out of their world, promising myself that I would never forget about it but being too fearful of what I may be taking unto myself to begin trying to dox any of these bastards again. I made some more approaches to newspapers but none of them were interested. Around early March, though - and perhaps because of my failure to get the media to take an interest - something snapped in me and, disgusted with myself for having backed down on that occasion, I began making a real effort to dox some more of them. I knew this sort of tactic wasn’t going to stop all of them but CS did seem to stop his trolling very shortly after I outed him, and at least for the first several months after Sean Duffy’s doxing he too also appeared to have ceased his campaign of persecution against the families of dead teenagers. This was a small something and a small something is better than a nothing.

  My efforts paid off when I was soon able to discover the identity of one very active RIP troller who was then going under the name and picture of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He had posted on his completely open Facebook profile a screengrab taken from his real account. It was a discussion about Doctor Who that he had earlier had with some friends of his and something in it seemed so important to him that he had felt the need to post it up for his trolling buddies to see. ‘Dmitri’ had used a paint program to scribble out the names of the people in the screengrab, but the ‘sad clown of Facebook’ as he was later memorably described as hadn’t done a good enough job of making his own name unreadable and after 10 minutes of careful study I was able to piece it together. It read ‘Hunter Mello,’ and that one little badly scrawled-out name led on to a shitstorm of doxing and drama which was to see numerous trolls having their dirty little secrets exposed to their families and neighbours, and eventually even leading to 36-year-old Colm Coss from Manchester being handed the UK’s first jail sentence for RIP trolling.

  Chapter Three. 4Chan and Anonymous

  Uh huh huh huh

  Butthead

  Uh huh huh huh huh huh

  Beavis

  To understand how and why a whole subculture has sprung up online that is dedicated to inflicting more pain upon those suffering bereavement we must look to the ‘asshole of the Internet’ as it is called, the 4Chan.org ‘/b/’ board.

  Here anonymity is taken to its most extreme with not even pseudonymous handles being used by its contributors. Instead, everyone on /b/ is encouraged to post totally anonymously, the idea being that no one has anything to live up to and that all can be let hung out.

  Started in 2003 by the then 15-year-old ‘moot’ as the owner Christopher Poole likes to be known as, 4Chan quite quickly exploded into the Internet consciousness. What had originally began as a messageboard to swap Japanese Anime art on somehow became a Web phenomenon used by millions and out of which has grown many of the - mainly painfully unfunny but sometimes slightly amusing - Internet memes that you will find popping up all over the place. If you don’t know what an Internet meme is, it is still a given that if you use the Web - or even if you don’t - you will have bumped into one or most probably more than one of them at some time or another. A meme itself is a cultural unit or idea that spreads like a virus and takes root among the wider population, in many cases adapting itself to changing circumstances and mutating in order to survive and thrive. Only the strongest memes will survive. Words are memes, and so ‘meme’ is a meme in itself, being started by evolutionary biologist (and famous atheist) Richard Dawkins to describe the process of how ideas take form and shape themselves among the peoples of the world. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word mimeme, meaning to replicate, and was shortened by Dawkins to rhyme with gene. A very clever bit of wordplay actually and so its popularity is a great example of how the best memes can spread widely throughout the general population. Another example of a meme is the idea that is crop circles, something which spread quickly over the world after two Englishmen made the first of them in the 1970s. The always-changing and evermore elaborate designs of these sometimes beautiful works of the prankster’s art may be compared to the memes generated on 4Chan in that both kinds of memes can baffle the outsider, being generated and built-on by those immersed in a quasi-secret culture. Although no Internet meme has come even close to achieving the brilliance of crop circles, or gotten anywhere near to being as gloriously entertaining, the machinery that moves them is basically the same.

  A prime example of an Internet meme - although not beginning on 4Chan - is ‘LOL,’ the most famous and widely used of all Web memes. An actual 4Chan meme would be the LOLCats, those cute Web images people make of cats with sometimes slightly amusing captions in them. 4Channers both on and off the site will often talk among themselves in their own little 4Chan meme code words, u
sing phrases such as ‘Over 9000,’ ‘All your base are belong to us,’ ‘Cool story, bro,’ and the like, the origins and meanings of which are far too tedious and unfunny to go into. The most famous 4Chan meme – and one which has risen way above most of the rest of them in terms of significance - has to be the idea that is the cult of Anonymous, which began its life on 4Chan but which now has spread out of the Internet itself. Adherents to Anonymous signify association with it by the wearing of Guy Fawkes masks, an idea carried over from another meme made popular on 4Chan, which is Epic Fail Guy: a cartoon stick figure wearing the mask and who fails at everything. The original idea for the mask is borrowed from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s brilliant 1980s comic series ‘V For Vendetta,’ or as is more likely from its inferior film adaptation, as the mask began doing the rounds on the Internet not long after the time of the film’s 2005 release, being firstly made popular on Web forums before finding its way onto Epic Fail Guy’s face (for reasons unknown to the author). In V For Vendetta, the mysterious ‘V’ takes on the Nazi-like rulers of an imagined dystopian England and all while wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. During the anti-capitalist protests that took off worldwide in 2011 the media focused in on demonstrators who were wearing these masks and it became something of a symbol of the protest movement. In the wearing of these masks the Anonymous protesters can play out a fantasy that they too are dangerous subversives like V.