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Nate Lanxon / Canon 5D MkIII

Jake Davis, AKA Topiary, scares

Fox News a lot. The spokesperson for online hacktivist group LulzSec and former member of Anonymous was arrested in July 2011 and charged with five crimes including unauthorised computer access and conspiracy to carry out a distributed denial of service attack on the Serious Organised Crime Agency's website.


Prior to his arrest, he had lived a sheltered life in the Shetland Islands, which he described at Wired 2013 as "culturally like the Wicker Man but with more sheep".

From the age of 13 he spent all day in his bedroom on his computer "instead of knitting or farming or dressing up as a viking all day".

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After five years, he discovered an Anonymous chatroom, and slowly became involved with the hacktivist group, eventually finding himself on the radio talking to a spokesperson from Westboro Baptist Church as Anonymous hacked the church's website live.

Shortly afterwards, he set up a separate hacking group with a brand and Twitter account: Lulzsec. Lulszec targeted The X Factor and put up a fake article on the PBS website saying Tupac and Biggie were alive and living in New Zealand.


They flooded my house, grabbed all my electronics, tore down some posters, opened up my fridge and freezer and looked at the food in case I was hiding microSD cards in my fish fingers Jake Davis

Nate Lanxon / Canon 5D MkIII

Taking things up a notch, Lulzsec targeted the US Senate, the CIA and SOCA. "That didn't go down too well," Davis said. One of Lulzsec's final acts before Davis was arrested was hacking Sun.co.uk in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, and placing a story saying that Rupert Murdoch had killed himself out of shame. "Ten days later I got a knock on my door," he said. He was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit a distributed denial of service attack. "They flooded my house, grabbed all my electronics, tore down some posters, opened up my fridge and freezer and looked at the food in case I was hiding microSD cards in my fish fingers."

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They shut down the local airport and flew Davis to London on a four-seater private jet they'd hired. He was then placed into holding cells, held as a Tier 1 threat for national security. "Tier 2 includes a biological attack by an enemy state," he said. "I was just a spokesperson who jokes, tweets and did a radio show. I didn't actually hack anything."


Davis described the ridiculousness of having to explain to police the meaning of the Lonely Island parody YouTube videos he was looking at when he was arrested. "I was just watching a funny video."

Davis was legally banned from the internet for two years. He was also banned from asking someone to look at something on the internet on his behalf. He was given an electronic tag and had to return to his house by 10pm every night. "So I moved to a new place I didn't know, I couldn't use Google Maps and I had to be back in my house by 10pm."

He was sentenced to two years at Feltham Young Offenders Institution, "where all the gang members go".

Since his release in June, he's been banned from encrypting files and banned from deleting his internet history until May 2018 -- he has to store all of his internet history onto USB sticks.


The most interesting web restriction? Being legally banned from communicating with anyone associated to or formerly associated with Anonymous. Something that is, frankly, impossible given that the whole point of Anonymous is that you don't know who the other members are.

The one piece of advice he offered the audience was "don't use the same password everywhere". One of his victims used the same seven-digit password for his World of Warcraft account as he did for his company's entire financial account. "50-70 percent of victims used the same passwords everywhere," he said.

Davis concluded his talk by talking about offline security, describing a time when he entered the UK's Wired office uncontested, without a pass, claiming to have left an umbrella in Wired magazine editor David Rowan's office. It turns out that he actually stole a shoe from Rowan's cupboard, and returned it to him on stage at the event.