On June 2, 2011, the antisec hacker group known as LulzSec launched a web site. Although they had been an active hacking group for several weeks, the creation of Lulzsecurity.com was their first official web presence other than the Twitter account they had been using.
Shortly after launching LulzSecurity.com, the group experienced a denial-of-service attack and the site was taken down. But within 45 minutes, they were back up and running again — and they had created an account with CloudFlare, a cloud-based security and performance service for web sites. CloudFlare offers both free and commercial services, and LulzSec had signed up for a free account.
For the next 22 days, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince and his colleagues were part of what he described as an intense experience that was at times alarming, but ultimately quite educational, as his company provided security protection for the group everyone wanted to take down.
“Every type of hacker was trying to find out where LulzSec was posted and how they can knock them offline,” Prince explained in a RSA Conference talk last week in which he detailed the story.
Matthew Prince, CEODuring the time CloudFlare provided services to LulzSec, they saw a myriad of attacks from all over the globe that ranged from Layer Seven attacks that Prince described as “harmless,” to one he termed as “clever” — an IP scan and attack on CloudFlare’s router interfaces. None were successful in taking down LulzSec.
