“Sabu,” as his Anon cohorts knew him, used to work at Manhattan-based Open Plans, a technology non-profit focused on using open data and software to improve transportation systems. According to Gizmodo, Mr. Monsegur used his work email address (xavier@openplans.org) to register domain names, a move both patently unprofessional and kind of silly.

Luckily, this minor security slip up turned out to be our gain. We contacted two of Sabu's former coworkers at Open Plans, who agreed to fill us in on what it was like to work with the most infamous snitch on the Internet.

“He worked as a sysadmin under pseudonym Xavier for a few months before being mysteriously fired,” one former coworker confided to Betabeat. “He was really chill, but too busy to play video games with us for some reason. ;)”

Oh, coy emoticon--you tease us so. Perhaps Sabu was too busy orchestrating large-scale attacks on PBS and Sony to worry about shooting zombies with his fellow Open Planners.

But Mr. Monsegur's impressive leadership skills apparently weren't evident to his coworkers. “I'm really surprised he turned out to be so far up in LulzSec,” another former coworker told us. “He seemed pretty nondescript, and was pretty quiet most of the time. He didn't seem that sketchy.”

Was he good at his job, we wondered.

“He seemed skilled at IT and ops, but not like he was amazing, you know?” one former coworker told Betabeat via Gchat. “[Sabu] wasn't particularly fast getting things done.”

For such a crappy neighbor, Sabu talked a lot at Open Plans about growing up in Alphabet City, and the increasing gentrification of the area.

“He talked about how he lived in Alphabet City forever and seemed kinda irked that now it was becoming a magnet for higher class NYC newcomers,” said our source. “He was obviously not rich. He seemed a bit ashamed of the fact.”

Unfortunately for Mr. Monsegur, it doesn't look like he'll be returning to the Lower East Side any time soon. He currently faces up to 124 years in prison. Nothing lulzy about that.

The F.B.I. may have snagged LulzSec by turning top hacker Sabu (Hector Xavier Monsegur) but if they thought that would put paid to hacking groups looking to make their bones, they were wrong. Welcome The Consortium, and their filleting of the porn site, Digital Playground. The Consortium didn't just cull passwords and emails of site admins, affiliates and users, they also discovered Digital Playground stored the credit card numbers of some 72,000 users in plain text. However if Digital Playground had your credit card for some reason, don't worry, The Consortium claims they play fair:

These credit cards are all plaintext but we will not be releasing or using as we do this for the love of the game not for profit and these peoples only crime was wanting some porn.

We cannot justify releasing these peoples credit card info, but remember it is DP that allowed this to happen, this could have been a different group.

And perhaps they may have done far worse when given this information.

Ars Technica reports the hack has been confirmed by A.V.N., which published a statement from Digital Playground that said in part:

Due to an alleged security breach, Manwin elected to temporarily shut down Digital Playground, and related websites, on March 5, 2012.

Manwin officially took over Digital Playground and related assets on March 1, 2012, and according to allegations, the potential breach may have occurred prior to that date.

As for The Consortium, in dropping the data they couldn't resist some finger-wagging at Digital Playground's administrators--and a subset of the site's users:

We did not set out to destroy them but they made it too enticing to resist. So now our humble crew leave lulz and mayhem in our path.

We not only have the 72k users of this site but also over 40k plaintext credit cards including ccvs, names and expiry dates. [...] And of course as this is a porn site there was no shortage of .mil and .gov emails in their user list.

The Consortium also stated that this is their "first release." The 'stay tuned' was implied.

via Fox News

Now that court documents have been unsealed, new details have emerged about Hector Xavier Monsegur, better known as LulzSec leader "Sabu" whose cooperation with the FBI helped facilitate an international raid on his top deputies earlier this week. Apparently in addition to being kind of a crappy neighbor, prone to noisy wrestling and rapping at the Jacob Riis housing projects on the Lower East Side, Mr. Monsegur was also a pretty willing informant.

Authorities were particularly careful about sealing documents related to Mr. Monsegur's arrest, noting that many LulzSec members knew his real identity and that hackers monitor public court dockets (how diligent!) and "dox" suspected government informants.

But we now know that Mr. Monsegur pleaded guilty to 12 criminal charges, including "three counts of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking, computer hacking in furtherance of fraud, conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and aggravated identity theft," reports the Wall Street Journal. For those charges, he faces up to 124 years in prison.

Considering that sentence and the fact that Mr. Monsegur is a foster parent to his two nieces, it's not hard to imagine why he would be willing to cooperate (even though it made Anonymous sad.) But in court transcripts, the authorities intimated that Sabu went above-and-beyond.

"Since literally the day he was arrested, the defendant has been cooperating with the government proactively," sometimes staying up all night engaging in conversations with co-conspirators to help the government build cases against them, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Pastore said at a secret bail hearing on Aug. 5, 2011, according to a transcript released on Thursday.

During the course of his cooperation, the feds said Mr. Monsegur received intel about "upwards of two dozen [online security] vulnerabilities" daily from his fellow cyber-criminals. If this is their way of scaring the hackers who were indicted earlier this week, we're pretty sure its working.

Here's the full indictment (via Gizmodo)
Ackroyd, Et Al. Indictment

via Fox News

This morning, officials on two continents raided top members of the hacker group LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous. According to a Fox News exclusive, the evidence used against them had been gathered by Hector Xavier Monsegur or “Sabu,” who was outed as LulzSec's leader last June. Sources told Fox that Sabu had been working with the government for months.

Under the alias "Sabu," Mr. Monsegur, an unemployed, 28-year-old father of two, "allegedly commanded a loosely organized, international team of perhaps thousands hackers from his nerve center in a public housing project on New York’s Lower East Side."

Mr. Monsegur apparently started working as a cooperating witness when he was identified by the FBI and pleaded guilty to "hacking-related charges" in August, in a case that will be unsealed today.

Officials believe LulzSec is responsible for billions of dollars in damage for malwebolence against the CIA, FBI, defense contractors, Fox, and Sony, among other corporations, international banks, and government entities.

As part of the raid, three men were arrested and two were charged with conspiracy. The indictment was filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York and is expected to be unsealed this morning. Of the five suspects, two men were from Great Britiain, two were from Ireland, and one was from Chicago.

Among those expected to be identified in the indictment, says Fox, are Jeremy Hammond aka “Anarchaos,” of Chicago, Jake Davis, aka “Topiary,” and Ryan Ackroyd, aka “Kayla” of London. Mr. Hammond, reportedly also a member of Anonymous, was allegedly behind the hack on Stratford, the U.S. security firm. Last July, the UK police arrested a 19-year-old believed to be "Topiary," who was once called LulzSec's "No. 2." Mr. Ackroyd, Sabu's "top deputy," according to Fox, allegedly found vulnerabilities in the U.S. Senate's computer systems and sent the intel to Sabu.

“This is devastating to the organization,” said an FBIofficial involved with the investigation. “We’re chopping off the head of LulzSec.”

In sharing theories on why LulzSec, the tech-smart "rocker hackers" disbanded last June, The Week quipped, 'Why quit while you're ahead" Reason number one? Getting caught.

In June, LulzSec announced its retirement (after "50 days of lulz") with the tweet, "What a coincidence. George Orwell was born on this day. (25 June 1903)." Shortly after that, the group jumped back to the Anonymous bandwagon to continue hacking governments under "Operation Anti-Sec."