A teenage crew from the English Midlands that spent 2011 sneering at LulzSec for being famous amateurs — "Lulzsec ARE Script Kiddies," they published, in banner type — while running their own spree: a former prime minister's address book dumped online, BlackBerry's blog defaced during the riots, the anti-terror hotline flooded for a day and a recorded call leaked to YouTube. Its founder, a Birmingham kid who called himself TriCk, did six months for it. Then he did the thing no rival in the scene ever did. He left for Syria, became the Islamic State's most prolific English-language recruiter, landed third on the Pentagon's kill list, and died at twenty-one at a petrol station in Raqqa under an American drone. The scene has a lot of dark endings. This is the darkest.
Lulzsec ARE Script Kiddies.
TeaMp0isoN, banner text from the crew's own anti-LulzSec/Anonymous zine, authored by "TriCk" — local archive mirror research/zines/exploit-db/onion/TeaMp0isoN/TeaMp0isoN_2.txt; on-site context at Crew Rivalries
WHO
TeaMp0isoN ("Team Poison") — a British hacktivist crew, active ~2010–2012; founded and fronted by "TriCk" — Junaid Hussain, b. c.1994, Birmingham FACT
SCENE
Rivals of LulzSec and Anonymous (see Crew Rivalries); core handles TriCk, MLT, iN^SanE, Hex00010. Claimed 1,400+ intrusions across the crew's run
THE DRAMA
Mocked LulzSec as "script kiddies"; leaked Tony Blair's address book (June 2011); defaced BlackBerry's blog during the August 2011 riots; flooded the anti-terror hotline (April 2012) — then TriCk left for ISIS
RECORD
Hussain pleaded guilty and was jailed six months (Southwark Crown Court, July 2012) for the Blair-adviser webmail hack and the hoax hotline calls. Other members were arrested; the crew dissolved in 2012 FACT
STATUS
PRINCIPAL DECEASED — Junaid Hussain (ISIS handle "Abu Hussain al-Britani") killed in a US drone strike near Raqqa, Syria, 24 August 2015, aged 21
This file is not an accusation; the accusations here were the British courts' and, later, the United States government's, and the record is not in serious dispute. It is a chronicle of how the loudest skeptic in the 2011 hacktivist scene — the crew that told LulzSec they weren't real hackers — produced a founder who walked off the scene entirely and into a death cult. The through-line is the distance between the two halves of one short life: a Birmingham teenager doing six months for a prank-call spree and a leaked address book, and the same person two years later coaching strangers toward mass murder from a keyboard in Raqqa, until a Hellfire missile ended it. The archive keeps both halves.
the drama timeline
ACT I — THE CREW THAT SNEERED (2010–JUN 2011)
A teenage crew from the Midlands decides the famous hackers of the moment are frauds — and sets out to prove it has better targets.
~2010
Team Poison, and its script-kiddie critique
A crew forms around a Birmingham teenager using the handle TriCk — later established in open court to be Junaid Hussain. As LulzSec and Anonymous dominate the headlines through 2011, TeaMp0isoN positions itself as the real thing and the rivals as poseurs, publishing an anti-LulzSec/Anonymous zine whose banner reads, flatly, "Lulzsec ARE Script Kiddies." The scene's oldest argument — skill versus spectacle — gets a new mouthpiece.
TeaMp0isoN breaks into the webmail account of one of Tony Blair's advisers and posts the former prime minister's address book — contact numbers, addresses, and personal details of Blair, his staff, and members of parliament — to Pastebin. The crew's note is pure swagger: "we got into the webmail server via a private exploit & we wiped the logs so Good luck." It is the hit that puts TriCk on a charge sheet.
ACT II — RIOTS, HOTLINES AND HANDCUFFS (AUG 2011–JUL 2012)
The pranks get louder and closer to the state. Then the state answers.
AUG 2011
BlackBerry, during the riots
As the England riots spread and BlackBerry Messenger becomes the rioters' coordination tool, RIM says it will help police. TeaMp0isoN defaces BlackBerry's official blog in response, warning the company off cooperating and siding openly with the rioters. A prank crew starts picking fights with institutions, not just corporations.
TeaMp0isoN floods the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorism hotline with automated calls for around 24 hours, then records a conversation with staff and posts it to YouTube — taunting the counter-terror apparatus directly. It is the stunt that turns a hacking case into something the Met takes personally.
Police move on the crew. Hussain is arrested; other members, including the hacker MLT, are picked up under the Computer Misuse Act and Malicious Communications Act. TeaMp0isoN dissolves as an active crew over the course of 2012.
At Southwark Crown Court, Hussain — then 18 — is sentenced to six months in a young offenders institution: three months for the Blair-adviser hack and posting the address book, three months for the hoax hotline calls, to run consecutively. By the standards of the scene it is an ordinary ending. It is the last ordinary thing about him.
The kid who mocked LulzSec for chasing attention leaves the scene for the most attention-hungry organisation on earth — and turns his keyboard on people's lives.
2013
He leaves
After his release, Hussain travels to Syria and joins the Islamic State, taking the nom de guerre Abu Hussain al-Britani. The hacktivist becomes a jihadist — the same online fluency, pointed at a new and far worse end.
Hussain becomes a leading figure in the Islamic State's "Cyber Caliphate" (the Islamic State Hacking Division). In January 2015 the group hijacks the US Central Command Twitter and YouTube accounts; that spring it publishes a "hit list" of US military personnel, urging followers to kill them. Hussain is, by US accounts, ISIS's most prolific English-language recruiter, coaching sympathisers in the West toward attacks — among them a gunman in the May 2015 Garland, Texas shooting.
CNN reports the death of Junaid Hussain, described by US officials as one of ISIS's most prolific online recruiters. The Birmingham teenager who once dismissed LulzSec as script kiddies, now the third-ranked target on the Pentagon's kill list.
The state that gave a teenage hacker six months in 2012 sent a missile in 2015. There was no second sentence.
AUG 24, 2015
Killed in Raqqa
A US drone strike hits a vehicle at a petrol station near Raqqa, killing Hussain and reportedly two others. He was 21. US officials described him as third on the Pentagon's ISIS target list; UK Prime Minister David Cameron later confirmed the strike in Parliament. The scene's most acid critic of "attention-seeking" hackers ended as the most-wanted hacker on the planet, killed by the state, mourned by no rival crew.
The record is not in dispute: TeaMp0isoN really did leak a former prime minister's address book, really did deface BlackBerry's blog during a national emergency, really did flood the counter-terror hotline and record the call. Hussain pleaded guilty and served time for it. None of that is contested, and none of it needs the ISIS chapter to be judged — it was crime, tried and sentenced, before he ever left Britain.
And the ending is the record too: whatever the crew's self-image as principled skeptics of LulzSec's clown show, its founder became a recruiter for mass murder and coached at least one attacker in the West. The "we're the real hackers" posture aged into something no rival ever approached. There is no rehabilitation reading available here.
The crew is not its founder: TeaMp0isoN's other members did their time and did not follow Hussain to Syria; MLT, for one, later resurfaced in ordinary vulnerability-disclosure work. Hussain's radicalisation is his own, and it is unfair to the rest of the crew — and to the record — to read ISIS backward onto a group of teenagers who broke into websites.
The 2011–12 hacks were, in scene terms, small: an address book, a defaced blog, prank calls. They were crimes, and they were punished as crimes. Nothing in the hacktivist phase forecast a drone strike; treating the whole arc as one seamless descent flatters hindsight and erases how ordinary the beginning was.
YOU DECIDE
The hacks were real and Hussain pleaded to them. The ISIS chapter is real and is documented by governments on two continents. What the archive cannot settle for you is how to hold them together: whether TeaMp0isoN was a footnote crew whose founder happened to become a monster, or whether the contempt it aimed at everyone else — LulzSec, Anonymous, the police, the press — was always pointed somewhere darker. Weigh the six-month sentence against the kill list. The distance between them is the whole file.
The archive does not deify, and it does not damn beyond the record. It keeps the guilty plea — and the drone strike.
evidence locker
PRIMARY / REFERENCE
Wikipedia — TeaMp0isoNATTRIBUTED — the crew, its founder TriCk (Junaid Hussain), the LulzSec/Anonymous feud, the Tony Blair leak, the BlackBerry defacement, the April 2012 hotline stunt, the arrests, and the 2012 disbandment.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeaMp0isoN
Wikipedia — Junaid HussainATTRIBUTED — birth in Birmingham, the 2012 conviction, the 2013 move to Syria, the Cyber Caliphate role, the CENTCOM hack and "hit list," and the 24 August 2015 drone strike.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junaid_Hussain
Wikipedia — MLT (hacktivist)ATTRIBUTED — a fellow TeaMp0isoN member, his 2012 arrest, and his later legitimate security-research work — the crew's other path.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLT_(hacktivist)
CONTEMPORANEOUS REPORTING
BBC News — "Man jailed for putting Tony Blair's address book online"ATTRIBUTED — July 2012 court reporting: the webmail hack, the address-book leak, the hoax hotline calls, and the six-month sentence.
bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-19018142
The Register — "Tony Blair bod's Gmail hack teen gets 6 months"ATTRIBUTED — the July 27, 2012 sentencing, the two consecutive three-month terms, and the offences admitted.
theregister.com/2012/07/27/teen_hacker_six_months/
BBC News — "UK jihadist Junaid Hussain killed in Syria drone strike, says US"ATTRIBUTED — the August 2015 US drone strike near Raqqa and Hussain's death.
bbc.com/news/uk-34078900
TIME — "British ISIS Hacker Believed Killed in U.S. Airstrike"ATTRIBUTED — the strike, Hussain's Cyber Caliphate role, and his standing on the Pentagon target list.
time.com/4012866/isis-hacker-airstrike-death/
Video — CNN, "'Most prolific' ISIS recruiter killed"ATTRIBUTED — broadcast report on Hussain's death and his role recruiting for ISIS.
youtube.com/watch?v=9JFpj1TyvOU
Darknet Diaries — "TeaMp0isoN" (ep. 109)ATTRIBUTED — long-form oral history of the crew and its members.
darknetdiaries.com/episode/109/
CROSS-LINKS
TeaMp0isoN zine — "Lulzsec ARE Script Kiddies"ATTRIBUTED — the crew's verbatim characterization of LulzSec, from the local archive mirror of the TeaMp0isoN e-zine (research/zines/exploit-db/onion/TeaMp0isoN/TeaMp0isoN_2.txt). First-party opinion, not adopted; no dox reproduced.
troll.fan/crew-rivalries.html
troll.fan — Sabu (Hector Monsegur)CROSS-LINK — LulzSec's informant captain, the other side of the feud.
troll.fan/dossiers/sabu.html
troll.fan — Crew RivalriesCROSS-LINK — TeaMp0isoN vs LulzSec in the context of the scene's other feuds.
troll.fan/crew-rivalries.html
troll.fan — TimelineCROSS-LINK — TeaMp0isoN's run in the wider chronology of the scene.
troll.fan/timeline.html
The standard. TeaMp0isoN's hacks, Junaid Hussain's July 2012 conviction and six-month sentence, his 2013 departure for Syria, his role in the Islamic State's Cyber Caliphate, and his death in a US drone strike near Raqqa on 24 August 2015 are documented public record — UK court reporting, the BBC, TIME, the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, and contemporaneous press — and are stated here as fact. The ISIS and terrorism material is stated soberly and attributed to major reporting; nothing is glorified. The "script kiddies" line is TeaMp0isoN's own characterization of LulzSec, quoted from the crew's own zine and attributed to them, not adopted as our judgment. No dox from that zine is reproduced. Hussain is deceased; the mitigating context — his youth at the time of the crew's hacks, and the fact that other members did not follow him — is given at full strength. If a line here couldn't survive scrutiny, it wouldn't be on the page.