When a hacker group can manage to infiltrate the CIA and bring it to its knees, you know that they’re a dangerous bunch. Only a few hackers have managed to do so, and Lulz Security happens to be one of them. Lulz Security is a bunch of criminal hackers who call themselves “the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense”. Whose expense, you ask? Well, it could be anyone. It could be even be you or me.

Recently, the group published more than 62,000 personal details on their Twitter account. The list contained people’s usernames and passwords on emails, bank accounts, and of course, Facebook. The list quickly became viral, having 200 downloads in the first 20 seconds and more than 2100 times within its first four minutes of release. They uploaded the list to Mediafire, but the site removed the files twice, first when it reached 7,500 downloads and again when it reached 30,000. They have since then uploaded the file into their own site, and the number of downloads has probably just increased since then.

A lot of people can’t seem to resist the lure of mischief. One user said that he ‘ordered a large pack of condoms for an elderly woman on Amazon’ and others were boasting about how they used people’s Facebook accounts in order to make trouble. One user even Twitted, “I chatted with some girl’s boyfriend and told him that I would never f*** him again. He said ‘no problem, I understand’ wtf”.

There could be thousands of people out there right now destroying people’s lives, perhaps even committing crimes, through the stolen Facebook passwords. Of course, everyone will agree that this is a huge violation of privacy. There were 62,000 passwords released, so there’s a small chance that either you or I could be in that list. It’s terrifying, to be perfectly honest. Worse, the hackers claimed that the passwords they released were just “a random assortment from a collection”. A collection – how many passwords could they possibly have in that collection? It’s really difficult to fathom. They don’t seem to be bluffing either; this criminal hacking group has been credited with hacking institutions such as Sony, the US Senate, the US Pubic Broadcasting System, Infraguard, and as mentioned earlier, the CIA. They have taken credit for crashing the CIA website for several hours last Thursday, and it certainly looks like they’re capable of a whole lot more.

You can check to see if you have been a victim of Lulz by using this Lulzsec lookup. According to TheNextWeb.com, this widget checks all of LulzSec’s publicly released lists. At the rate they are hacking sites, this might be a good site to bookmark!