This. While reading the article, I couldn't help but imagine the legions of extremely bright Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, etc hackers, most likely orders of magnitude more sophisticated than Sabu, looking at the LulzSec shenanigans with disdain and comparing our western hacking scene with Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight.

That being said, LulzSec et. al. were more about social activism than about accomplished hacking. For a mission like that you really need some mainstream appeal, and for that purpose the newage digital messiah fit the bill.