Update: (July 15, 2012) Someone claiming to be Avunit, the remaining original member of Lulzsec still at large, has claimed through Twitter that the person interviewed for this story (who was an admin on AnonOps IRC) was impersonating the real Avunit. It's apparent that either (1) @AvunitAnon is the actual Avunit and someone masqueraded as him within Anon IRC for over six months unchallenged; (2) the Twitter account is fake, or (3) Avunit is now denying the story to distance himself from his earlier comments.

Shocked by the betrayal by top Anonymous/LulzSec hacker Hector "Sabu" Monsegu, the last of the original LulzSec members still publicly unindicted is understandably nervous about his own fate.

The hacker known as "Avunit" left LulzSec well before the group "disbanded" last year, but he could still face charges—and he isn't sure whether he's been exposed or not.

In the wake of the indictments and arrests of all the other original members of LulzSec, Avunit says he's a "bag of nerves" and is preparing to drop out of the Anonymous universe entirely. He's now trying to figure out what to do next. In an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversation with Ars Technica, Avunit said, "[I'm] on a new laptop I bought today and everything else that could be incriminating has literally been burned."

"A good lesson"

The reaction among others on Anonymous IRC channels in the wake of the Sabu news was far from the angry, forceful one we saw in response to the arrests of 25 alleged Anonymous members in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, and Spain on February 28. One member urged others to remain calm and carry on: "Dont fucking panic...the lulzsec guys got infiltrated and were caught for HACKING not for being member of anonymous...anonymous is too big to go after, and the charges would be too small to actually do something.....but a good lesson for the sql injectors out there : dont boast about anything and trust NOONE ..stay ANONYMOUS!"

Among Anons, doubts about Sabu had been circulating for some time prior to the revelation of his informant status. Some members of Anonymous began to suspect he was working with the FBI after the LulzSec arrests last summer. LulzSec "disbanded" after the arrests, but some of the members continued to attack government and corporate website under the banner of "AntiSec."

Some Anonymous members went to pains to distance themselves from the activities of LulzSec and Antisec, and the hacking of Stratfor in particular. Members of the group posted a denial of Anonymous' involvement in the attack on Stratfor, which they described as an unbiased media outlet rather than a government-sponsored spy think-tank.

"Hackers claiming to be Anonymous have distorted this truth in order to further their hidden agenda, and some Anons have taken the bait," members of Anonymous claimed. "Stratfor analysts are widely considered to be extremely unbiased. Anonymous does not attack media sources."

Sabu remained a presence on the Anonymous IRC channels up untll this week. But as the news broke yesterday, administrators of the #anonops channel added his handle to the "bad word list"—anyone typing "sabu" would be automatically ejected from the channel.

"I'm done, bro"

For his part, Avunit split with LulzSec when the group began its attacks on government servers as part of its "Fuck FBI Friday" operations. Since then, he's been aligned with the AnonOps collective within Anonymous, where he has restricted himself mostly to working on denial-of-service tool development and guiding new recruits.

Avunit was shaken by Sabu's willingness to cooperate with authorities, especially since he learned much of the craft of hacking from Sabu. "I cant even describe what it's like to have someone that taught you, and quite honestly inspired me (and many others), turn on the very people that trusted him the most," he told me.

While sympathetic to the fact that Sabu's children may have influenced his decision, he didn't understand how Sabu could have put his family at risk in the first place. "Why would you get involved with something like this if you had kids that relied on you?" he asked. "If I had kids I would get a 'responsible' job/hobby."

As for his own involvement in Anonymous, Avunit said, "I think I'm done, bro." He was considering changing locations, but he said he was concerned about being picked up in transit, "because if I try and leave through an airport and they know my ID, it'd be like walking to prison and handing myself in."

At the end of the conversation, he logged off IRC with the quit message, "Adios anonops <3 ."