Hacker group Luzsec finally announced Saturday on Pastebin (linked on its Twitter feeds) that they are disbanding after 50 days of digital mayhem. The group performed various acts of theft, vandalism, and exposure of confidential information. Their final batch of files, demonstrating their knack for hacks, is being released via BitTorrent (though the link is dead now).

“For the past 50 days we’ve been disrupting and exposing corporations, governments, often the general population itself, and quite possibly everything in between, just because we could,” the group wrote in its statement.

The final file was titled LulzSec’s “booty,” containing various documents and images, among them a a US Navy website civilian jobs board.  LulzSec’s provocative acts started with posting names, addresses and phone numbers of the contenders on Fox TV Program’s “The X Factor,” after which they decided to mess with UK ATM machines by posting transaction logs. The biggest file among the collection is AT&T’s LTE wireless network internal documents, covering 600 megabytes worth of storage.

Despite LulzSec calling it off, 19-yr-old Ryan Cleary, who was said to have ties to the group, was arrested in the UK for being guilty of charges related to the now-famous hacker troupe. For a less threatening sentence, he might as well give away a good deal of information regarding Lulzsec. Of course, LulzSec publicly disavowed anything but the most tenuous connection to Cleary on their public Twitter feed.

Even with his capture, the legal brawl is far from over. Moreover, there are pieces of information released by rival gangs and even former LulzSec members of the hacking group’s current members. The evidence includes a number of accounts and lengthy chat room transcriptions which ended up in the hands of newspaper publications such as The Guardian. It’s only a matter of time before the authorities find more like Cleary to shed light into the matter.

There are countless Internet crimes that have been committed in the past, many of which go without resulting arrests.  This includes Hacking for Girlies back in 1998 when the group impaired the New York Times website.  They held an interview with Forbes, and that was the last of them. As for LulzSec, they might fall into oblivion like Hacking for Girlies, but this depends on the members themselves. They cannot talk about once being part of the infamous group no matter how popular they were at one point.

It is also possible that the group will die but the legacy will go on. A bunch of young boys might pick up where the pieces of what was left behind, picking up the hackers’ torch. They might carry out graver acts in an effort to outdo the original, and so the cycle goes on.