Lulz Security, the group of hackers that have made a name for themselves with hacks of Sony, Nintendo, PBS, and more, claimed yesterday that it was calling it quits, with no more hacking or releases of stolen documents under the LulzSec name planned for the future. To celebrate the end of LulzSec, the group released final torrent of pilfered material: more documents and user credentials from a range of sources including AOL and AT&T.

The press release claims that LulzSec only planned to operate for fifty days, and hence that this decision to ditch the LulzSec name was not being made in response to the continued pressure the group is coming under from both law enforcement and other hacking groups. This claim is a little hard to reconcile with the release of documents stolen from the Arizona DPS that the group made on Friday. That publication was claimed to be the first of many, with more documents due to arrive on Monday, and subsequent documents on a weekly basis. If such releases are made, they won't be under the LulzSec brand.

The documents released on Friday were collected as part of "Operation Anti-Security", the name LulzSec has given to a bunch of attacks made on law enforcement and private security companies. In the press release announcing the retirement of the LulzSec name, the group expressed the hope that AntiSec would continue, and that security organizations would continue to come under attack. AntiSec was itself somewhat contradictory: LulzSec always maintained that it was motivated by amusement rather than political principles, and yet the decision to specifically make law enforcement agencies the target was an apparently political one.

These political motivations are also hard to reconcile with many of the releases the group has made; even the last torrent of information contained usernames and password hashes for gaming forums and the game Battlefield Heroes. As a result of that security breach, EA has taken Battlefield Heroes offline until the problem can be remedied. The torrent itself has been pulled by The Pirate Bay after it was found that the files taken from AT&T included malware.

One factor that may have encouraged LulzSec to retire its name and perhaps keep a lower profile is the continued efforts by the group's opponents to uncover the identities of those behind the LulzSec name and publish as much personal information about them as possible. A group calling itself The A-Team posted a substantial amount of data about members of LulzSec yesterday, and this release may have been the straw that broke the camel's back, forcing LulzSec to drop out of the public eye.

Though the LulzSec name may now be dead, former members are promising that its AntiSec mission will continue, albeit in a less centralized way.