4 the lulz

This post was published on TechCrunch by the author Aaron Crayford. He currently holds the position of CEO of Mighty, whose main product is a smart real-time communication framework . But while he was in high school, he was harassed by the US government for so-called "The highest organized systematic attack that the Pentagon survived." He was forbidden to touch the computer and tell the story for 10 years. On twitter, he is @aaroncray .

In all the news now Lulzsec, wiping the nose of the CIA , as well as members of the group Anonymous, caught in Spain .

Heroes, hackers or losers? I have seen many different stories. Mine looks like this:

FBI agent: “Tell us how you got into the satellite monitoring system of the Livermore National Laboratory .”
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Guy: "Do you want to know (in a whisper) do you really want to know?"

FBI agent: "Of course, tell me."

Guy: "Magic."

FBI agent: “This is not a fucking kid game!”

The games have just begun! The year was 1998, when 20 FBI agents broke into my house. I was too fat kid, sitting in the most diligent group in the classroom physics. And what are Lulzsec and Anonymous? Who are these guys ? What the hell are they doing playing ... With the CIA ?! They are friends of the revolution. Washington is our time. Their weapons are botnets 500 gigabits thick, and their spies are worms and rootkits. They eradicate injustice systematically and alternately, right?

I knew that I would not be sent to prison and I knew that I had a great excuse why I did not do my homework in chemistry.

Guy: "The FBI interrogated me all night, I didn't have time."

Teacher: “Aaron, go sit back to your seat. This is the dumbest excuse I've ever heard. ”

(I already mentioned that I was sure that I would never go to jail?) These are guys of the cropped mind. Criminals never think of themselves as criminals, simply because it is a very subjective concept. Even if today you asked me what I did then, I would concentrate on facts such as demolishing providers with child pornography, a patch of several thousand compromised government systems, and turning hated websites into pages dedicated to Chanukah ... for lulz. “Noob,” “lulz,” and so on — we used these concepts long before gaming networks and assholes on Facebook, and they were as fun as they are now.

FBI agent: "Hey, you moron, you raised the whole of Sweden with your bullshit."

Sometimes it happens. One group comes and proclaims another war ... WAR! Right? And it looks more like a game of monopoly than the destruction of the economy, because this is not even mentioned the next day. You opened a friend's system, laughed, and that was it. It’s hard to imagine the consequences of a site like eBay, Facebook or Sony. Lulz thinks it's funny. It's awesome fun, but the unpleasant fact is that at the end of the working day, the employees of such a company feel hurt, and the Sony CEO still sits in his Maybach and goes to a private mansion. They even call him "Sir Knighthood" - by analogy with the one who beats the very heart of innovation, the guy in the garage .

So what is it? What makes these guys do all this? Must they be evil? They must be stupid morons? Is it possible that they are geniuses? Maybe. One thing is certain: they understand how to bypass the control systems better than the techies at Sony. Consider it this way: imagine that, with enough time, you could hack anything or write a command and stop any web site on the planet. What would you do? The hardest part is not to understand what you would actually do (unless you are doing it right now). And I'm not talking about a miscarriage from Harvard, which pulls you away from the bar and tells you how long he worked on writing a script in PHP (here I am bitten by fluffy rabbits ). I'm talking about writing code, an exploit that no one has ever seen before, on a napkin in a drunken state, and when you try it a little later, it compiles and runs perfectly, proving that you understand an extremely complex system better than its creator . The most difficult part is finding such a skill, and dudes who possess it never intend to break into someone else's systems. Because the use of such knowledge always comes to mind after. So, you have the skill, and you hear the story of some smart-ass guy who came up with another innovation ...

In your garage, the same guy as yourself.

Which back recreated the game console, designed the opposite.

Because he bought it and owned it.

And I thought that I could do with her everything that pleases him.

As any normal person will think.

That's all. A company that tries to wipe this little boy off the face of the earth, the creator of innovation, attracts your attention. Your anger. And you are one of the bulls rushing at its red gate. This is how they see it. And although the reality is that the FBI agents and the CIA will monitor you over the next months / years, it does not stop anyone, because the same thing that got him now turns you on. They believe that what they are doing is justice. After all, those who are fired due to the fact that the gaming network has fallen, do not even make up 0.1% of the total mass, and “Sir Knighthood” will not lose a minute of sleep in its huge king-size bed, standing on each floor of a private mansion on the hill .

What Lulzsec and Anonymous do not understand is that companies are not their enemies. Their exploits are shockingly cool, and for sure they can even be called "karma", but there are systems that are much harder to crack. For example, become a dude at the head of the board of directors. So when you are a 40-year-old CEO who hears that some kid, some youngster in his garage, blows your product into pieces and gets up to it the devils, depriving you of the top line of profit, and the vice-president of the company gathers a team of lawyers in order to discuss possible counteractions, you simply stop this meeting and say: “Find this guy, pay him and let's see what we can do.” This is a real hack, worthy of a commercial, ending with the fact that now you are sleeping in your huge king-size bed, standing on each floor of a private mansion on a hill, and hardly anyone can say that " it already was ."

Few people, if ever there was at least one person in the technology industry, were trying to achieve that. Perhaps those who worked in safety, for people about whom I am even afraid to ask or tell.

So happy hacking. I hope that you will develop your own skills for your own prosperity. Stay safe and they won't catch you. If this happened, and you are asked how you succeeded, answer simply: “Magic.”