TEA: a women's-safety app that demanded your driver's license, then leaked 72,000 of them.LIFELOCK: the CEO put his real SSN on billboards. It was stolen thirteen times.VOATZ: a blockchain voting app that reported the student who tested it to the FBI.4CHAN v OFCOM: fined £520,000, it answered with a giant AI hamster.EQUIFAX: 147M records lost — then two insiders traded the secret first.FORTINET: one SSH password for every firewall — "a management issue."CROWN STERLING: pitched "quantum AI encryption," got heckled offstage, sued the con.PHINEAS FISHER: read a spyware report, said "that's fucked up," gutted the makers.SABU: ran LulzSec for the lulz, then informed on his own crew.LIZARD SQUAD: knocked PlayStation and Xbox offline on Christmas — "because we can."

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The card shop wore his face

The store that trolled the reporter — then got robbed and dumped to him.

"No. I'm the real Brian Krebs here."

For four years BriansClub ran the biggest stolen-card store on the internet under the name, face and photo of the reporter who covers people like its owners — mock copyright and all: "© 2019 Crabs on Security." Then an anonymous source handed the real Krebs the shop's entire database: 26 million stolen cards, nearly a third of the whole underground's inventory. He did the one thing the branding guaranteed he would — shipped it all to the banks so the cards could be killed. When he filed a support ticket titled "Your site is hacked," the administrator replied with the line above.

Sourced to court records and contemporaneous reporting · the namesake got dumped by the namesake.

Read the case file →

Two desks, one standard

the industry · the underground

The Industry Desk

Charlatans

The people and companies who sell you security, held to their own record: credential fabricators, snake-oil vendors, breach-then-lie public companies, spyware merchants, compliance theater. The frauds with a booth at the conference.

Enter the Charlatans desk →

Conference Capture Institutional Failures Government FOSS Governance

The Underground Desk

Drama

Forty years of the scene eating its own: crew wars, the antisecurity movement, the snitch arc, the zines, the booter kids and the reporter they went to war with. Sourced to the mirrored zines and the court record.

Enter the Drama desk →

Crew Rivalries The Chronicle

Today's rogues

the marquee drama, both desks

DEF CONA $30 cash-at-the-door party that became a $580, thirty-thousand-person institution — with a code of conduct and a ban list.Industry Crown SterlingPaid $115k to pitch "quantum AI encryption" at Black Hat, got heckled off stage — and sued the conference for it.Industry LulzSecSix people, a cat-in-a-monocle logo, fifty days. Sailed the "Lulz Boat" through Sony, the CIA and the Senate.Underground SabuLed LulzSec — then flipped and helped the FBI build cases against his own crew. The scene's cardinal sin, on the record.Underground Phineas FisherRead a spyware report, said "that's fucked up," and gutted Gamma and Hacking Team. Never caught.Underground NSO GroupZero-click Pegasus, a leaked list of 50,000 numbers, and a $167.3M verdict with a permanent injunction.Industry Lizard SquadGrounded PlayStation and Xbox on Christmas morning, then a plane with a bomb-threat tweet. "Because we can."Underground Punchmade DevSet his financial crimes to a beat, pushed it to millions of views — then sued his bank for freezing the money.Underground Mitnick vs ShimomuraA Christmas-Day break-in, a two-month manhunt with a Times reporter riding along, and a decade fighting over who lied.Underground Goatse Security"Gaping Holes Exposed" — trolls who pulled 114,000 iPad-owner emails off AT&T's own signup page.Underground John McAfeeAntivirus founder turned fugitive turned crypto pitchman — who filmed himself explaining how to uninstall the software that bears his name.Industry LOD vs MODTwo teenage phreak crews spent three years cracking each other's boxes — the "Great Hacker War" its own vets call a fabrication.Underground

→ The full archive — 140+ sourced case files, both sides, one per subject

Live off the wire

Receipts posted to X as they drop — tagged, sourced, and refreshed daily. Bring your own.

troll.fan:~$ tail -f x/wire

view live on X → post a receipt →

The standard. Every entry on this site is sourced to court records, news reporting, SEC filings, congressional testimony, or archived watchdog pages, with each subject's own defense presented beside the case. The burden of proof is on us, not the subject. If it can't survive a defamation challenge, it doesn't belong here. Spiritual successor to Jericho's attrition.org Charlatan List — and the receipt wins.