With the arrest of its members and the revelation that its leader was an FBI informant, one might have thought that LulzSec would fade into history. Apparently not. A YouTube video posted at the weekend has announced that LulzSec will return. On April 1st the group will be back, and attack corporations and governments, promising "epic operations and pranks."

The LulzSec video downplays the arrests and insists that LulzSec remains a going concern. "Several days ago we decided to swiftly bring back our humble hacking group and set sail towards the Interwebz once again, much to the dismay of corrupt governments and corporations across the planet," proclaims the video's computer-generated voice. "It's ridiculous to believe that by arresting the six prime members of LulzSec that you've stopped us. You haven't stopped us, you have merely disrupted the active faction."

The new LulzSec targets are as broad and varied as the old LulzSec targets: "Lulzsec will start targeting governments, corporations, agencies, and quite possibly the people watching this video." The motivation is similarly nonspecific: "We are here for the lulz, the fame, the anarchy, and the people."

An Anonymous Web site linked LulzSec's return to "Project Mayhem," a new operation with a long and rambling manifesto that seeks to use hacks and artwork to subvert or undermine governments and corporations and create social change. On December 21st of this year, Project Mayhem will, apparently, provoke a global financial meltdown through a series of bank runs. Critical infrastructure will also be attacked. A Web site related to the project cites George Orwell and implies that the Proles will rise up on this date.

Closer to the present day, Anonymous has set its sights on security firm Imperva, after members of the collective misread an article about the company.

In response to Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Madrid as part of World Youth Day in 2011, Anonymous attacked the Vatican's Web site, an action taken as part of a larger project called "Operation Pharisee." Over a period of 25 days last year, the group initially tried to find and exploit security flaws on the site. When this failed, they tried to take it offline with a denial of service attack. However, even with traffic levels 34 times higher than normal, the site remained accessible.

After this attack, Imperva published a document describing Anonymous' techniques. The New York Times covered this document. In that coverage, the Times quoted Cole Stryker, author of Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web, who described the group as "a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots."

Anonymous has attributed this description to Imperva and, taking offense at it, decided to go on the attack; "Operation Imperva" is underway.

Whether LulzSec's return, Project Mayhem, or Operation Imperva will actually amount to anything remains to be seen. Anonymous has a long history of announcing operations, only to later denounce them, with different factions within the group attacking each other due to operations seen as ill-advised. For example, "Operation Global Blackout" was a plan to attack critical DNS servers, which after an initial flurry of interest was then dismissed as an attempt to troll some group or other. There have been similar announcements and then retractions of plans to attack Facebook and other sites. These new videos and plans have been uploaded by a single YouTube user, and might represent nothing more than the latest piece of troll warfare and infighting.