A tangled web of hackery ... LulzSec ties by association

The LulzSec (RIP) chatlogs published by the Guardian last week gave us an fascinating glimpse inside the loosely-hierarchical hackers behind many recent profile attacks.

But we didn't get a graphic of the various LulzSec associations. Fortunately, the Nonynews blog has stepped in.

The above graphic shows how closely each of the pseudonymous hackers are linked, according to the five days worth of their private chats. Line thickness corresponds to relation strength, the colours correspond to the importance of each member (important marked red, then reduced through to yellow, green, aqua and, finally, blue).

Joepie91 emerges as most engaged in the interactions, despite apparently being a fringe member when it comes to targeting and attacking websites.

Looking at the personal stats, all of the key players – Sabu, his No. 2, Topiary, and prolific DDoSer, storm – chat mostly with Joepie91. The table below ranks members based on their input into the chats. According to this, roughly half of those involved over the five day period are fringe members (or alternative aliases used by the main players).

Big talk ... LulzSec members ranked by engagement in leaked chats

There is also time-based analysis (not shown here) which shows that the most discussion goes on between 1200 and 1800 (though the participants might be in different time zones). This may be some clue to which time zones the members actually live in - though of course hackers are usually thought of as night-owls rather than larks, no matter which time zone they're in.

And if you were after clues over why the dastardly group disbanded, behold their indecision: