WEBVTT - A Hacker's Redemption (Part 1) 0:00:10.520 --> 0:00:17.000 On a warm evening on June seven, Hector Montger heard 0:00:17.040 --> 0:00:20.320 someone at his door and opened the door. I see 0:00:20.320 --> 0:00:24.119 the whole FBI squad just standing there, he said, come on, 0:00:24.360 --> 0:00:30.080 step out of the door. Unbeknownst to his family and friends, 0:00:30.360 --> 0:00:33.519 Hector seven, at the time had become one of the 0:00:33.600 --> 0:00:37.199 most notorious hackers on the Internet. The year before, he 0:00:37.360 --> 0:00:41.040 joined the online vision anti collective Anonymous, and just a 0:00:41.120 --> 0:00:43.920 month earlier had co founded the off shoot low sec. 0:00:44.880 --> 0:00:48.640 With these groups, he had launched devastating attacks on governments 0:00:48.640 --> 0:00:51.440 and businesses worldwide. He could go to prison for the 0:00:51.479 --> 0:00:57.760 rest of his life for these crimes. And so my 0:00:57.880 --> 0:01:02.200 mind at this moment is warning millions of miles per second. 0:01:02.240 --> 0:01:05.440 I mean, I'm telling you now, I had to figure 0:01:05.440 --> 0:01:09.000 off the next move because they had me. Do you 0:01:09.080 --> 0:01:11.200 had that I was a blowner. I was dead, you know, 0:01:11.240 --> 0:01:29.840 I was done unless there was a way out. Hi. 0:01:29.920 --> 0:01:33.400 I'm brad Stone and I'm Akio. And this week on Decrypted, 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:36.040 we're telling you the story of the former Anonymous hacker, 0:01:36.319 --> 0:01:41.520 Hector Monsterer a k A. Sobly. Over the years, much 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:44.600 has been written about his cyber attacks, his arrest, and 0:01:44.680 --> 0:01:48.320 his subsequent decision to secretly cooperate with the government. A 0:01:48.360 --> 0:01:51.960 lot of those stories, Hector says, got the facts wrong. Today, 0:01:52.000 --> 0:01:55.000 he's opening up about his full story about how a 0:01:55.120 --> 0:01:57.480 kid who grew up in the projects, who didn't even 0:01:57.520 --> 0:02:00.560 finish high school somehow came to break into the computer 0:02:00.640 --> 0:02:04.880 systems of multi billion dollar companies and governments. Will also 0:02:04.920 --> 0:02:08.959 trace his unlikely path to redemption. This story is divided 0:02:09.000 --> 0:02:11.959 into two episodes. This is part one, and if you 0:02:12.040 --> 0:02:14.760 subscribe to the show, Part two should already be in 0:02:14.800 --> 0:02:34.120 your feed. Stay with us, Thank you. It's literally cold. 0:02:35.240 --> 0:02:37.359 In December, I flew to New York to go meet 0:02:37.360 --> 0:02:41.280 Hector for the first time. Actor. How's it going nice 0:02:41.280 --> 0:02:43.240 to meet Nice to meet you two than to make 0:02:43.400 --> 0:02:46.760 good time today. We started the day in the Lower 0:02:46.800 --> 0:02:50.480 East Side of Manhattan by the Jacob Rees public housing projects. 0:02:51.360 --> 0:02:54.799 This is where Hector's grandmother landed when she emigrated from 0:02:54.800 --> 0:02:57.840 Puerto Rico in the late sixties. She held onto that 0:02:57.919 --> 0:03:01.440 same apartment where Hector himself lived for much of his life. 0:03:02.120 --> 0:03:03.440 You're gonna look up to the stage for you to 0:03:03.440 --> 0:03:08.080 see you a window with air conditioning. Okay, that's it, 0:03:09.120 --> 0:03:13.240 And and that was in my whole life, you know, 0:03:14.800 --> 0:03:17.919 Hector was born when his parents were teenagers. He says 0:03:17.960 --> 0:03:20.240 his dad wasn't ready to be a father, and his 0:03:20.360 --> 0:03:24.280 mom left the family when Hector was still young. She 0:03:24.320 --> 0:03:25.760 was trying to get a better life. She's trying to 0:03:25.760 --> 0:03:28.600 get out of this whole because once you stuck here, 0:03:28.639 --> 0:03:33.240 let me tell you, once you get stuck here, you're 0:03:33.280 --> 0:03:35.880 just stuck here. There's not a lot of success stories here. 0:03:37.040 --> 0:03:39.960 That left Hector with two main parental figures in his life, 0:03:40.240 --> 0:03:44.680 his grandmother and his aunt. As a young kid, there 0:03:44.760 --> 0:03:48.200 was a good kid. He didn't keep a big social circle. Ever, 0:03:49.400 --> 0:03:52.480 that's his aunt, who Hector has asked me not to identify. 0:03:52.600 --> 0:03:54.960 You'll see why as we get deeper into the story. 0:03:55.120 --> 0:03:57.760 A good kid. I got no complaints about him. He 0:03:57.800 --> 0:04:01.640 was the best son Monica asked for one. Very polite, 0:04:02.040 --> 0:04:08.680 very well mannered. Hector's a big guy. He's six too, 0:04:09.000 --> 0:04:11.400 and on this morning he was wearing a black hoodie 0:04:11.520 --> 0:04:14.760 under another black hoodie with a baseball hat. He pointed 0:04:14.760 --> 0:04:16.960 to a corner where a guy just got shot in 0:04:17.000 --> 0:04:19.719 the head the other week. But he says this area 0:04:19.839 --> 0:04:23.000 was a lot worse when he was growing up. Back 0:04:23.040 --> 0:04:26.200 in the days, they used to have little crack bottles. 0:04:26.800 --> 0:04:30.599 Seen those. I tried to google a quick picture for you. 0:04:31.480 --> 0:04:35.760 But if there was that trend where there was a 0:04:35.760 --> 0:04:38.520 train where instead of start up putting the cracking bags away, 0:04:38.760 --> 0:04:43.320 now they just put the crack and crack bottles. I 0:04:43.400 --> 0:04:48.440 used to see that all over the place. That wasn't 0:04:48.440 --> 0:04:52.240 the only way Hector's life was intertwined with crime. His aunt, 0:04:52.440 --> 0:04:55.560 that same aunt he just heard from so heroin and 0:04:55.640 --> 0:04:59.279 his dad was also involved in the drug business. So 0:04:59.360 --> 0:05:00.960 he was a guy that you would call if your 0:05:01.000 --> 0:05:03.719 drug dinner and someone knows your money and there's a problem, 0:05:03.720 --> 0:05:06.760 my father would come and beat you up, kidnap you're 0:05:06.800 --> 0:05:09.360 throwing in the back of the car or something. He's 0:05:09.400 --> 0:05:12.000 a sweetheart now, by the way, my father is a 0:05:12.040 --> 0:05:14.240 lovely gentleman. But back in the days, he was young 0:05:14.240 --> 0:05:19.880 and stupid. One day when he was a preteen, Hector's 0:05:19.920 --> 0:05:22.440 aunt brought him a computer. She wanted me to do 0:05:22.520 --> 0:05:24.919 hold my homework and stuff and writer reports, so she 0:05:24.960 --> 0:05:27.880 bought me like at the time, it was like it 0:05:28.000 --> 0:05:29.799 was like the Model. It was like the super computer, 0:05:30.680 --> 0:05:33.680 his super desktop. It was it was a sony vile. 0:05:33.839 --> 0:05:36.200 I had like sixteen megabytes of RAM they had, like 0:05:37.000 --> 0:05:40.240 had a Pennium on sixty six chip it in had 0:05:40.279 --> 0:05:45.760 a twenty eight point eight upgraded came over him, Um, 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:50.080 it was like a Cadillac. Hector sounds super excited here, 0:05:50.360 --> 0:05:52.880 but when his aunt first gave him this computer, he 0:05:52.960 --> 0:05:56.000 really didn't take an interest. He was busy playing outside 0:05:56.000 --> 0:05:59.000 with his friends, and the computer got stored in a closet. 0:05:59.279 --> 0:06:04.000 Everyone forgot about it. Shortly after this, Hector's life took 0:06:04.000 --> 0:06:08.440 a dramatic turn. My aunts and my father were arrested, 0:06:10.160 --> 0:06:13.400 and you know, the cops came and arrested my grandmother 0:06:14.000 --> 0:06:16.760 in our apartment. So I was there with the cops game. 0:06:16.800 --> 0:06:20.640 They pulled up to the door and they let me 0:06:20.640 --> 0:06:28.880 and my brother go with nowhere to go. Hector, thirteen 0:06:28.960 --> 0:06:31.240 years old at the time, stood out on the streets 0:06:31.400 --> 0:06:34.520 until the sun rose. Then he got passed around the 0:06:34.560 --> 0:06:37.719 homes of a couple of relatives until his grandmother got 0:06:37.720 --> 0:06:40.120 released on bail and took him back to the sixth 0:06:40.160 --> 0:06:43.680 floor apartment in the Lower East Side. The police had 0:06:43.800 --> 0:06:47.320 ransacked the place once everybody was gone, and we threw 0:06:47.360 --> 0:06:51.080 everything out. I'm going to the close in the moment, 0:06:51.960 --> 0:06:55.400 there's a massive sony vital box there this time, eager 0:06:55.400 --> 0:06:59.080 for an escape, Hector took an interest. It's like you 0:06:59.080 --> 0:07:01.480 don't wine the first time, and it's like you got 0:07:01.560 --> 0:07:05.400 mail a well, um, but I had like a Copey serve, 0:07:05.520 --> 0:07:09.680 trial copy cercles, another service similars a well, and I'm 0:07:09.720 --> 0:07:12.280 just gonn online and I'm just talking to people. At first, 0:07:12.320 --> 0:07:14.680 I thought the world fake, right, I thought they were 0:07:14.680 --> 0:07:19.080 like robots or something. Just can't be real, the chat bots. 0:07:20.080 --> 0:07:22.480 I started cursing people out as a thirteen real kid. 0:07:22.480 --> 0:07:27.960 I mean, you know, my insults were childish, and uh, 0:07:28.120 --> 0:07:30.960 people started crushing me back. I was like, wow, there's 0:07:31.000 --> 0:07:34.400 either some really sophisticating pots or these are real people. 0:07:41.840 --> 0:07:44.640 When Hector's aunt gave him the computer, she had one 0:07:44.720 --> 0:07:48.840 warning because of the way our minds run in my family. 0:07:50.640 --> 0:07:52.840 The only thing my words to him more when I 0:07:52.880 --> 0:07:57.000 gave him that computer, word, this is a federal offense. 0:07:58.680 --> 0:08:03.200 Whatever you do, don't do nothing criminal wan, which is 0:08:03.280 --> 0:08:06.679 excellent advice. But with his aunt and dad in prison, 0:08:06.840 --> 0:08:10.280 Packtor and his grandmother had very little money. Who was 0:08:10.320 --> 0:08:14.480 just meeting her surviving off like a boat six months 0:08:14.560 --> 0:08:18.760 as a side check. So it was a tough situation 0:08:19.280 --> 0:08:20.840 and I needed to find way to get a line 0:08:20.840 --> 0:08:25.040 for free. Hector came up with an ingenious and illegal solution. 0:08:25.520 --> 0:08:27.760 He would use other people's a o L accounts to 0:08:27.800 --> 0:08:31.280 get online, either by guessing their passwords or even by 0:08:31.280 --> 0:08:34.400 pretending to be an AOL employee to trick users and 0:08:34.559 --> 0:08:37.680 handing over their personal information. You know what they say, 0:08:37.679 --> 0:08:42.439 like marijuana is a gateway drug, well pastor cracking is 0:08:42.480 --> 0:08:47.160 another gateway drug. I think a lot of us remember 0:08:47.240 --> 0:08:49.720 that moment when we first got dial up internet at 0:08:49.760 --> 0:08:52.560 home and the things that made the Internet feel a 0:08:52.559 --> 0:08:55.520 little magical. Oh. Absolutely. I remember the first time I 0:08:55.559 --> 0:08:58.480 was in university talking with my high school friends that 0:08:58.520 --> 0:09:00.680 were at different colleges around the world. Old and the 0:09:00.720 --> 0:09:04.000 idea of just communicating with them online seemed, you know, 0:09:04.120 --> 0:09:08.000 completely amazing. Yeah, you know. For me, and I'm just 0:09:08.040 --> 0:09:10.920 a couple of years younger than Hector, chatting with my 0:09:11.000 --> 0:09:14.320 friends on a well instant messenger was my thing. But 0:09:14.400 --> 0:09:17.320 for Hector, the Internet was a different kind of toy, 0:09:18.280 --> 0:09:21.240 vast library that he could just get lost in. I 0:09:21.240 --> 0:09:23.840 would wake up in the morning before school, before I 0:09:23.920 --> 0:09:27.120 quit school, and I was just gonna liine and just 0:09:27.400 --> 0:09:30.160 read I'll go to out of Vista dot com because 0:09:30.160 --> 0:09:32.520 Google wasn't that big yet, so he had out of East. 0:09:32.679 --> 0:09:35.520 You had exite. So I'll just type in how to 0:09:35.559 --> 0:09:40.800 hack or Unix or systems administration or whatever. I'll just 0:09:40.800 --> 0:09:43.679 sit there read manuals. That was just reading and reading 0:09:43.679 --> 0:09:46.280 and reading and reading. And then at some point I 0:09:46.360 --> 0:09:49.559 broke into my first system without pastwards, without anything like that, 0:09:50.360 --> 0:09:52.720 and it was a Japanese university server. What was the 0:09:52.760 --> 0:09:55.600 purpose of breaking into that server? So proof a concept? 0:09:55.679 --> 0:09:58.240 Can I do it? And then they became my my 0:09:58.240 --> 0:10:02.719 my test bet right, and I learned so much of 0:10:02.960 --> 0:10:06.920 that system. We should be clear. Hacking into a university 0:10:07.000 --> 0:10:10.360 server is definitely a crime, but Hector is still an 0:10:10.400 --> 0:10:15.679 early teen at this point. Like he loved that there 0:10:15.720 --> 0:10:18.280 was something new that he could focus on and get 0:10:18.320 --> 0:10:28.000 away from the world we was in when he was sixteen. 0:10:28.360 --> 0:10:32.800 Hector's hacking morphed into something different, something more politically charged. 0:10:39.080 --> 0:10:42.040 At the time, in the year two thousand, Puerto Ricans 0:10:42.040 --> 0:10:45.160 were protesting the U. S. Navy for conducting bombing practice 0:10:45.200 --> 0:10:49.040 on the island of Yekes, the exercises that accidentally killed 0:10:49.040 --> 0:10:53.080 a civilian there. Hector, who remembers of Puerto Rican descent 0:10:53.480 --> 0:10:56.600 joined the protests online by hacking into a Puerto Rican 0:10:56.679 --> 0:11:00.880 government server and defacing its website. Sooner after, when Hector's 0:11:00.920 --> 0:11:04.440 grandma was watching TV coverage of the protests, she heard 0:11:04.520 --> 0:11:07.840 something odd. They kept referring to a person called Sabu, 0:11:08.120 --> 0:11:11.280 the online pseudonym that Hector it started going by. The 0:11:11.360 --> 0:11:14.599 name was a reference to a particularly vicious wrestler, and 0:11:14.679 --> 0:11:16.920 she knew that I was calling myself Sabu. So she 0:11:16.960 --> 0:11:18.680 came to me and she was like, what are you doing. 0:11:19.440 --> 0:11:23.079 What's your name? I said, Look, man, I don't know. 0:11:24.040 --> 0:11:27.240 You know, I'm in a way. I'm I'm a rebel 0:11:27.360 --> 0:11:29.719 trying to be a rebel. Okay, I'm trying to be 0:11:29.800 --> 0:11:33.199 checking Vara. You know, my mother's fear was that they 0:11:33.200 --> 0:11:36.960 were retaliated, come come looking for him. You know, that 0:11:37.040 --> 0:11:39.440 was always a fear of everything. She tried to give 0:11:39.480 --> 0:11:41.920 me a fline. She would like, disconnect the computer. I 0:11:41.960 --> 0:11:45.559 was sleeping, and because I never saved anything, Hector didn't listen. 0:11:46.080 --> 0:11:48.800 And his aunt, who is probably the only other person 0:11:48.840 --> 0:11:51.720 who could have stopped him, was still in prison trying 0:11:51.760 --> 0:11:55.640 to avoid getting into any more trouble herself. So every 0:11:55.679 --> 0:11:57.199 time he came to talk to me, I was like, 0:11:57.480 --> 0:11:59.600 I don't want to know please, I don't want to 0:11:59.640 --> 0:12:03.400 know us because the only person I have told him 0:12:03.440 --> 0:12:07.320 that was his adrenal room. Shortainly after the Vikes hack 0:12:07.559 --> 0:12:10.480 in the ninth grade, Hector dropped out of school. He 0:12:10.520 --> 0:12:13.160 said he was depressed, missing his dad and his aunt 0:12:13.280 --> 0:12:16.520 who were still in prison, living under financial strain, and 0:12:16.520 --> 0:12:19.400 as he got more isolated in the real world, Hector 0:12:19.480 --> 0:12:23.200 sought a community online. One day, he was approached by 0:12:23.240 --> 0:12:28.079 the guy who ran the underground hacker group Hackwiser. He 0:12:28.200 --> 0:12:30.839 was really cool, probably one of the coolest people have 0:12:30.920 --> 0:12:34.200 ever met on the Internet. And he's like, yeah, Sabo, 0:12:34.280 --> 0:12:37.160 Like I wanting to participate, and you know, we got 0:12:37.240 --> 0:12:42.640 some stuff coming up soon after. This happened late Saturday 0:12:42.720 --> 0:12:48.360 night in Washington Sunday morning in China. A United States 0:12:48.760 --> 0:12:53.959 Enable Maritime Patrol aircraft on a routine surveillance mission in 0:12:54.080 --> 0:12:59.840 international airspace over the South China Sea collided with one 0:12:59.840 --> 0:13:06.319 of two Chinese fighters that were shadowing our plane. Both 0:13:06.440 --> 0:13:10.720 our aircraft and a Chinese aircraft. The collision killed the 0:13:10.840 --> 0:13:13.720 Chinese pilot and the American plane was forced to make 0:13:13.760 --> 0:13:17.440 an emergency landing, the Chinese government refused to release the 0:13:17.440 --> 0:13:22.880 plane's American crew until President George Bush apologized. The showdown 0:13:23.000 --> 0:13:26.719 led to a bizarre skirmish where Chinese hackers hacked US 0:13:26.800 --> 0:13:31.679 government websites and left politically charged messages on them, and 0:13:31.760 --> 0:13:33.599 so all they got all the US hackers were like, 0:13:33.600 --> 0:13:35.080 all right, we gotta do something too, We have to 0:13:35.200 --> 0:13:37.959 we have to fight back, and uh, we just learted 0:13:37.960 --> 0:13:41.240 hacking the out of Chinese government websites. So you're kind 0:13:41.240 --> 0:13:46.040 of like a rogue cyber warrior basically for the United States. 0:13:50.960 --> 0:13:54.080 A few years later, in two thousand two, Hector's aunt 0:13:54.120 --> 0:13:57.040 and dad were released from prison. With his family back, 0:13:57.360 --> 0:14:00.280 Hector's life came to resemble something much closer to the 0:14:00.320 --> 0:14:03.560 lives of other teenagers his age. He started taking more 0:14:03.640 --> 0:14:07.360 time away from the computer, attending protests in real life 0:14:07.360 --> 0:14:10.080 on the streets where he met student activists at the 0:14:10.120 --> 0:14:14.719 local universities, just hanging out with him at mcsorley's over there, 0:14:14.760 --> 0:14:18.360 and you know by Saint Mark's and um, just hanging 0:14:18.360 --> 0:14:20.320 out the bars in the back, just drinking and talking 0:14:20.320 --> 0:14:24.960 about politics. He even got legit jobs as a system administrator, 0:14:25.120 --> 0:14:27.880 which is essentially like an I t guy, and that 0:14:27.960 --> 0:14:30.200 was a different person. You know, I was just working 0:14:30.240 --> 0:14:32.880 and living life. I would still dabble here and there. 0:14:33.120 --> 0:14:35.080 It is in order for you to to maintain your 0:14:35.080 --> 0:14:37.680 experience and skills, you obviously have to continue, right, But 0:14:37.800 --> 0:14:40.000 I wasn't doing act of his operations like I used 0:14:40.040 --> 0:14:43.560 to it. During his pause on his high profile hacks, 0:14:43.960 --> 0:14:46.960 Hector helped start a computer security firm with a Swedish 0:14:47.000 --> 0:14:50.560 business partner. They secured some clients in the Nordic region, 0:14:50.920 --> 0:14:53.960 but the business folded shortly after. Then he got a 0:14:54.040 --> 0:14:57.120 job at a nonprofit earning a hundred thousand dollar salary. 0:14:58.040 --> 0:15:00.880 But life was about to get a lot tough. That's 0:15:00.880 --> 0:15:16.600 coming up. Welcome back. We left her story with things 0:15:16.680 --> 0:15:19.480 looking up for Hector, but by the late two thousand's, 0:15:19.640 --> 0:15:22.960 Hector's grandma was sick with the worsening case of diabetes. 0:15:23.360 --> 0:15:27.920 She could barely get out of bed. Hector was her caretaker. Meanwhile, 0:15:28.120 --> 0:15:31.400 Hector's aunt had gone back to dealing heroin. In two 0:15:31.440 --> 0:15:35.080 thousand nine, she got arrested again. She had two young 0:15:35.200 --> 0:15:38.240 daughters who were three and five years old, and with 0:15:38.280 --> 0:15:40.560 his aunt gun, it was up to Hector to raise 0:15:40.600 --> 0:15:46.960 the girls. Did you feel ready for that responsibility to 0:15:47.000 --> 0:15:51.480 become a father. Over night us insane. By the spring 0:15:51.520 --> 0:15:54.120 of two thousand ten, between taking care of the girls 0:15:54.160 --> 0:15:56.760 and taking care of his grandmother, Hector couldn't make a 0:15:56.800 --> 0:15:59.560 normal office job work. He lost his job at the 0:15:59.600 --> 0:16:03.240 nonpro off it, and then he lost his grandmother. He 0:16:03.360 --> 0:16:06.920 was twenty six at the time. Her dying is just 0:16:06.960 --> 0:16:10.640 like I couldn't even cry. I was just like, wow, 0:16:10.840 --> 0:16:13.920 I can't believe in why this, Why me? Where is 0:16:13.960 --> 0:16:16.040 she gone? But then you had to come to the realization, 0:16:16.120 --> 0:16:23.080 dude's been sick for ten years. I was there at 0:16:23.120 --> 0:16:26.320 home with the kids. We were as low as possible. 0:16:26.560 --> 0:16:28.400 Trust me when I tell you were really, really low. 0:16:29.520 --> 0:16:35.920 Um that's the lowest ever been because I had the girls. 0:16:35.960 --> 0:16:37.400 But then what times I was scared, I couldn't be 0:16:37.520 --> 0:16:40.920 I couldn't feed them. You know that's why spiral. Yeah, yeah, 0:16:41.160 --> 0:16:43.760 that's when I really lost it and I just started 0:16:43.800 --> 0:16:52.400 hacking the planet man m Some of Hector's hacks came 0:16:52.440 --> 0:16:55.960 out of these destitute times. On a few occasions, he 0:16:56.000 --> 0:17:00.800 hacked a company that sold auto parts. So, for example, 0:17:00.880 --> 0:17:05.320 someone didn't order for a car motor and the destination 0:17:05.640 --> 0:17:09.600 was Connecticut I would change the destination to a location 0:17:09.600 --> 0:17:11.720 in New York, and I would pick up the motor 0:17:11.800 --> 0:17:14.560 and and I sold them and just bold the kids 0:17:14.600 --> 0:17:19.320 food and both crayons and coloring books. But most of 0:17:19.359 --> 0:17:22.800 Hector's hacks were far more ambitious in their scope. And 0:17:22.840 --> 0:17:25.800 those hacks were sparked by a video that Wiki Leaks 0:17:25.840 --> 0:17:42.000 published online in April two five and individuals Roger that 0:17:42.640 --> 0:17:46.879 so the views from a US Army helicopter, and you 0:17:46.920 --> 0:17:49.119 can see the gun's cross hairs in the middle of 0:17:49.119 --> 0:17:52.800 the frame. You hear the American soldiers aboard discussing the 0:17:52.800 --> 0:17:58.280 group of men they see below. All right, we got 0:17:58.280 --> 0:18:02.359 a guy with an rpgre walking and the helicopter who 0:18:02.359 --> 0:18:07.720 starts praying them with bullets. Pretty graphic. You're seeing arms, 0:18:08.119 --> 0:18:11.080 heads ripped off. You're like, damn, it's pretty tough. But 0:18:11.160 --> 0:18:14.320 this guy's gotta be terrorists. Two of the people who 0:18:14.359 --> 0:18:17.920 are shot for journalists with the news agency Reuters. US 0:18:18.000 --> 0:18:22.680 soldiers mistook their camera equipment for weapons. The video sparked 0:18:22.720 --> 0:18:26.119 public outrage, it became a rallying cry for the hacker 0:18:26.160 --> 0:18:31.440 group Anonymous, and it reignited something within Hector. It really 0:18:31.480 --> 0:18:34.880 bothered me because here in New York growing up. I'm 0:18:34.880 --> 0:18:38.840 not gonna I'm not gonna talk too bad about the NYPD, 0:18:39.000 --> 0:18:42.880 but I've seen stuff these cops have done. I guess 0:18:42.920 --> 0:18:46.440 people in authority, right, they have a gun, they feel 0:18:46.480 --> 0:18:49.040 like they have the authority to shoot first, ask questions later. 0:18:49.280 --> 0:18:51.080 And you had no idea if the guys with journalists 0:18:51.119 --> 0:18:53.760 or not. And he just shot him. And but you 0:18:53.760 --> 0:18:58.000 don't really killed me. Watching the ambulance, right, you saw 0:18:58.040 --> 0:19:00.480 the guy with the van. He tried to swop people 0:19:00.480 --> 0:19:06.200 who that were still alive come on and make his 0:19:06.240 --> 0:19:07.760 blew them up with his kids. I mean, that was 0:19:07.800 --> 0:19:15.320 tough to watch. Claire. With the renewed drive to act, 0:19:15.520 --> 0:19:18.199 Hector wanted to do something, and he went on a 0:19:18.280 --> 0:19:21.400 hunt to join Anonymous, which was gaining notoriety at the time. 0:19:22.160 --> 0:19:25.120 He watched the YouTube videos posted by the group, which 0:19:25.119 --> 0:19:27.600 took him to the website for Chan, where he found 0:19:27.640 --> 0:19:30.840 the links to join Anonymous. Is online chat forums on 0:19:30.920 --> 0:19:34.399 i r C, which stands for Internet Relay Chat right. 0:19:34.440 --> 0:19:36.359 The i r C was sort of an Internet wide 0:19:36.400 --> 0:19:38.480 bulletin board. You can almost think of it like a 0:19:38.480 --> 0:19:41.480 big version of Slack where you can join individual channels. 0:19:41.520 --> 0:19:44.480 De voted to different topics, and this is where he 0:19:44.560 --> 0:19:47.600 found the Hackers channel. And Hector got approached by a 0:19:47.640 --> 0:19:51.120 guy who went by the handle T Flow. Yes, Hector, 0:19:51.160 --> 0:19:54.639 if you wanted to join a secretive hacker club. Hector 0:19:54.680 --> 0:20:02.080 said yes, So Andy invite me to have grew a 0:20:02.200 --> 0:20:06.760 room called Internet Fats, and Internet Fairs was full of 0:20:06.840 --> 0:20:10.920 like all the big names, so anonymous. At the time, 0:20:12.000 --> 0:20:15.480 it was deep place to be in. Earlier we heard 0:20:15.520 --> 0:20:18.480 Hector talk about hacking the planet. You can take that 0:20:18.560 --> 0:20:23.160 pretty literally. I've done a lot of hacks. I've I've 0:20:23.200 --> 0:20:26.680 done thousands of hacks. I've done hacks so big that 0:20:26.960 --> 0:20:29.479 you will never know. I can never discuss it. But 0:20:29.680 --> 0:20:31.639 out of out of everything that you know and with 0:20:31.720 --> 0:20:34.600 the media knows, with the public knows, one of the 0:20:34.600 --> 0:20:38.040 bigger hacks is average spring stuff. This he's referring to 0:20:38.320 --> 0:20:41.760 is the Tunisian uprising of eleven, which went on to 0:20:41.840 --> 0:20:47.520 spark similar protests across the Arab world. The people's protests 0:20:47.520 --> 0:20:50.640 are in no way cooling down, even as the politicians 0:20:50.640 --> 0:20:54.320 agreed on plans for a coalition government including the opposition. 0:20:59.000 --> 0:21:02.960 I don't want other is berracious were but I saw 0:21:03.000 --> 0:21:08.800 the Tunisian situation as something that could change history. They 0:21:08.840 --> 0:21:11.360 could probably cause a chain reaction in the Middle East 0:21:11.400 --> 0:21:13.200 and get rid of a lot of the dictators that 0:21:13.280 --> 0:21:17.560 were there. And I thought, you know what, I could 0:21:17.560 --> 0:21:24.600 probably help these people. So Hector and a number of 0:21:24.640 --> 0:21:29.159 Anonymous hackers attacked the Tunisian government's network, disrupting officials email 0:21:29.480 --> 0:21:34.400 and defacing the Prime Minister's website. Hector joined similar attacks 0:21:34.480 --> 0:21:39.200 on other authoritarian regimes, including the governments of Algeria, Yemen, 0:21:39.359 --> 0:21:43.680 and Zimbabwe. And then there were Anonymous as less worldly hacks. 0:21:44.080 --> 0:21:47.840 The group punished companies that had shunned wiki leaks. For example, 0:21:48.119 --> 0:21:51.480 when PayPal, Visa and master Cards started blocking donations to 0:21:51.520 --> 0:21:55.560 wiki leaks, the Anonymous hackers slowed or knocked offline their websites. 0:21:56.520 --> 0:21:59.680 But perhaps the group's most brazen attack during this time 0:22:00.040 --> 0:22:02.840 was an act of revenge. It was against the guy 0:22:02.920 --> 0:22:06.679 called Aaron Bar. He was the CEO of HB Gary 0:22:06.760 --> 0:22:10.639 Federal Now HB Gary is a cyber security firm that 0:22:10.720 --> 0:22:14.680 offers protection to corporations and governments from cyber attack. Bar 0:22:14.880 --> 0:22:18.639 threatened Anonymous by telling The Financial Times he had collected 0:22:18.680 --> 0:22:22.800 information on their core leaders, including many of their real names. 0:22:23.240 --> 0:22:26.919 The response was swift. Anonymous took down their website, stole 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:29.879 thousands of emails and posted them on the internet. The 0:22:29.920 --> 0:22:36.000 CEO resigned. I remember this story. Aaron Barr's boss got 0:22:36.000 --> 0:22:37.679 a lot of attention. It was it was just the 0:22:37.800 --> 0:22:39.680 hubrist of it all, and then of course it all 0:22:39.760 --> 0:22:42.040 came back to bite him. I even remember writing a 0:22:42.080 --> 0:22:44.600 Business Week article about it at the time. Yeah, what 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:48.960 made the hack extra risky wasn't just the publicity it generated. 0:22:49.200 --> 0:22:51.399 Hector and I talked about this over lunch at a 0:22:51.480 --> 0:22:54.879 diner where he'd order these big breakfasts to wind down 0:22:55.040 --> 0:22:58.240 after an all night hacking spree. I was like, Wow, 0:22:59.119 --> 0:23:01.720 I really lost the boundary, Like I really went too far. 0:23:02.320 --> 0:23:05.280 The HP guy was a federal contractor, that's a core 0:23:05.400 --> 0:23:09.480 US asset. UM, and you like had the girls at 0:23:09.480 --> 0:23:12.360 that point, right, so like, but you didn't think, like, wow, 0:23:12.440 --> 0:23:15.120 I should really stop before I get so I got 0:23:15.160 --> 0:23:18.800 the kids, I was already involved in other hacking operations. 0:23:18.800 --> 0:23:21.200 It was just so late. I could have slowed it down. 0:23:21.280 --> 0:23:24.119 You're right, and that's definitely mistake. That's definitely something that 0:23:24.119 --> 0:23:27.000 I admit, Like I could have stopped, um, I would 0:23:27.000 --> 0:23:29.400 have got arrested. Either way, but I could at least 0:23:29.400 --> 0:23:32.760 stopped and maybe lessen the blow. Um, but I was 0:23:33.040 --> 0:23:34.639 I was at the point, at least I felt like 0:23:34.680 --> 0:23:37.919 I was at the point of no return. And uh, 0:23:38.480 --> 0:23:41.200 sometimes you know, agatting part of my language, because sometimes 0:23:41.240 --> 0:23:44.520 you have a moment. Right as this was all going down, 0:23:44.760 --> 0:23:48.320 his aunt was still in prison. One time, Hector visited 0:23:48.400 --> 0:23:52.440 with her daughters and his friends. The friend that accompanied 0:23:52.520 --> 0:23:55.960 him up to that visit told me, you need to 0:23:56.040 --> 0:23:57.720 hurry up and come home. There's a lot of things 0:23:57.720 --> 0:24:01.160 going on that I can't tell you. And having him 0:24:01.280 --> 0:24:03.480 tell me that was enough for me to be like, 0:24:07.160 --> 0:24:11.679 what could possibly be going on? And then I was 0:24:11.680 --> 0:24:14.159 getting little bits and pieces like from my aunts that 0:24:14.280 --> 0:24:16.640 they would try to meet up with him or see 0:24:16.680 --> 0:24:19.800 my daughters or something, and there's a bad We don't 0:24:19.800 --> 0:24:25.080 know what Pop is doing, but you know something's not right, 0:24:25.440 --> 0:24:31.159 but nobody could tell me specifically what it was. In 0:24:31.200 --> 0:24:34.399 May two thleven, Hector embarked on what would be his 0:24:34.600 --> 0:24:40.600 final hacking spring. It was a situation where the last 0:24:40.640 --> 0:24:42.960 of us, the last of the Internet fens, we were 0:24:42.960 --> 0:24:45.720 in a room by ourselves. We had survived a whole 0:24:45.720 --> 0:24:48.760 bunch of drama and arguing and fighting. So it was 0:24:48.800 --> 0:24:53.679 just a six which was me um Kayla, t Flow, Topiary, 0:24:53.960 --> 0:24:58.600 pone Source, and Ava Unit. They called themselves low Seck 0:24:59.040 --> 0:25:02.600 lowsper laughs SEC for security. There's a group of young 0:25:02.640 --> 0:25:06.640 guys making fun of the cybersecurity industry. Each day they 0:25:06.680 --> 0:25:11.119 hacked the different entity companies like Sony Pictures, PBS, Nintendo, 0:25:11.800 --> 0:25:15.320 And they didn't do it quietly. They published press releases 0:25:15.359 --> 0:25:17.840 to take credit for the attacks, and in the day 0:25:17.880 --> 0:25:21.359 they dubbed f FBI Friday. You can just imagine what 0:25:21.440 --> 0:25:24.720 that first F stands for. Low Sec even hacked the 0:25:24.720 --> 0:25:28.359 Atlanta chapter of an organization affiliated with the FBI called 0:25:28.440 --> 0:25:33.600 Infra Guard. The hackers stole and released logging credentials, passwords, 0:25:33.640 --> 0:25:37.920 and other confidential information. They also defaced the chapter's website, 0:25:38.240 --> 0:25:41.240 posting a YouTube video with words above it that said, 0:25:41.280 --> 0:25:45.240 in all caps, let it flow, you stupid FBI battleships. 0:25:46.160 --> 0:25:49.560