Speaker 1: On a warm evening on June seven, Hector Montger heard
Speaker 1: someone at his door and opened the door. I see
Speaker 1: the whole FBI squad just standing there, he said, come on,
Speaker 1: step out of the door. Unbeknownst to his family and friends,
Speaker 1: Hector seven, at the time had become one of the
Speaker 1: most notorious hackers on the Internet. The year before, he
Speaker 1: joined the online vision anti collective Anonymous, and just a
Speaker 1: month earlier had co founded the off shoot low sec.
Speaker 1: With these groups, he had launched devastating attacks on governments
Speaker 1: and businesses worldwide. He could go to prison for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life for these crimes. And so my
Speaker 1: mind at this moment is warning millions of miles per second.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm telling you now, I had to figure
Speaker 1: off the next move because they had me. Do you
Speaker 1: had that I was a blowner. I was dead, you know,
Speaker 1: I was done unless there was a way out. Hi.
Speaker 1: I'm brad Stone and I'm Akio. And this week on Decrypted,
Speaker 1: we're telling you the story of the former Anonymous hacker,
Speaker 1: Hector Monsterer a k A. Sobly. Over the years, much
Speaker 1: has been written about his cyber attacks, his arrest, and
Speaker 1: his subsequent decision to secretly cooperate with the government. A
Speaker 1: lot of those stories, Hector says, got the facts wrong. Today,
Speaker 1: he's opening up about his full story about how a
Speaker 1: kid who grew up in the projects, who didn't even
Speaker 1: finish high school somehow came to break into the computer
Speaker 1: systems of multi billion dollar companies and governments. Will also
Speaker 1: trace his unlikely path to redemption. This story is divided
Speaker 1: into two episodes. This is part one, and if you
Speaker 1: subscribe to the show, Part two should already be in
Speaker 1: your feed. Stay with us, Thank you. It's literally cold.
Speaker 1: In December, I flew to New York to go meet
Speaker 1: Hector for the first time. Actor. How's it going nice
Speaker 1: to meet Nice to meet you two than to make
Speaker 1: good time today. We started the day in the Lower
Speaker 1: East Side of Manhattan by the Jacob Rees public housing projects.
Speaker 1: This is where Hector's grandmother landed when she emigrated from
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico in the late sixties. She held onto that
Speaker 1: same apartment where Hector himself lived for much of his life.
Speaker 1: You're gonna look up to the stage for you to
Speaker 1: see you a window with air conditioning. Okay, that's it,
Speaker 1: And and that was in my whole life, you know,
Speaker 1: Hector was born when his parents were teenagers. He says
Speaker 1: his dad wasn't ready to be a father, and his
Speaker 1: mom left the family when Hector was still young. She
Speaker 1: was trying to get a better life. She's trying to
Speaker 1: get out of this whole because once you stuck here,
Speaker 1: let me tell you, once you get stuck here, you're
Speaker 1: just stuck here. There's not a lot of success stories here.
Speaker 1: That left Hector with two main parental figures in his life,
Speaker 1: his grandmother and his aunt. As a young kid, there
Speaker 1: was a good kid. He didn't keep a big social circle. Ever,
Speaker 1: that's his aunt, who Hector has asked me not to identify.
Speaker 1: You'll see why as we get deeper into the story.
Speaker 1: A good kid. I got no complaints about him. He
Speaker 1: was the best son Monica asked for one. Very polite,
Speaker 1: very well mannered. Hector's a big guy. He's six too,
Speaker 1: and on this morning he was wearing a black hoodie
Speaker 1: under another black hoodie with a baseball hat. He pointed
Speaker 1: to a corner where a guy just got shot in
Speaker 1: the head the other week. But he says this area
Speaker 1: was a lot worse when he was growing up. Back
Speaker 1: in the days, they used to have little crack bottles.
Speaker 1: Seen those. I tried to google a quick picture for you.
Speaker 1: But if there was that trend where there was a
Speaker 1: train where instead of start up putting the cracking bags away,
Speaker 1: now they just put the crack and crack bottles. I
Speaker 1: used to see that all over the place. That wasn't
Speaker 1: the only way Hector's life was intertwined with crime. His aunt,
Speaker 1: that same aunt he just heard from so heroin and
Speaker 1: his dad was also involved in the drug business. So
Speaker 1: he was a guy that you would call if your
Speaker 1: drug dinner and someone knows your money and there's a problem,
Speaker 1: my father would come and beat you up, kidnap you're
Speaker 1: throwing in the back of the car or something. He's
Speaker 1: a sweetheart now, by the way, my father is a
Speaker 1: lovely gentleman. But back in the days, he was young
Speaker 1: and stupid. One day when he was a preteen, Hector's
Speaker 1: aunt brought him a computer. She wanted me to do
Speaker 1: hold my homework and stuff and writer reports, so she
Speaker 1: bought me like at the time, it was like it
Speaker 1: was like the Model. It was like the super computer,
Speaker 1: his super desktop. It was it was a sony vile.
Speaker 1: I had like sixteen megabytes of RAM they had, like
Speaker 1: had a Pennium on sixty six chip it in had
Speaker 1: a twenty eight point eight upgraded came over him, Um,
Speaker 1: it was like a Cadillac. Hector sounds super excited here,
Speaker 1: but when his aunt first gave him this computer, he
Speaker 1: really didn't take an interest. He was busy playing outside
Speaker 1: with his friends, and the computer got stored in a closet.
Speaker 1: Everyone forgot about it. Shortly after this, Hector's life took
Speaker 1: a dramatic turn. My aunts and my father were arrested,
Speaker 1: and you know, the cops came and arrested my grandmother
Speaker 1: in our apartment. So I was there with the cops game.
Speaker 1: They pulled up to the door and they let me
Speaker 1: and my brother go with nowhere to go. Hector, thirteen
Speaker 1: years old at the time, stood out on the streets
Speaker 1: until the sun rose. Then he got passed around the
Speaker 1: homes of a couple of relatives until his grandmother got
Speaker 1: released on bail and took him back to the sixth
Speaker 1: floor apartment in the Lower East Side. The police had
Speaker 1: ransacked the place once everybody was gone, and we threw
Speaker 1: everything out. I'm going to the close in the moment,
Speaker 1: there's a massive sony vital box there this time, eager
Speaker 1: for an escape, Hector took an interest. It's like you
Speaker 1: don't wine the first time, and it's like you got
Speaker 1: mail a well, um, but I had like a Copey serve,
Speaker 1: trial copy cercles, another service similars a well, and I'm
Speaker 1: just gonn online and I'm just talking to people. At first,
Speaker 1: I thought the world fake, right, I thought they were
Speaker 1: like robots or something. Just can't be real, the chat bots.
Speaker 1: I started cursing people out as a thirteen real kid.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, my insults were childish, and uh,
Speaker 1: people started crushing me back. I was like, wow, there's
Speaker 1: either some really sophisticating pots or these are real people.
Speaker 1: When Hector's aunt gave him the computer, she had one
Speaker 1: warning because of the way our minds run in my family.
Speaker 1: The only thing my words to him more when I
Speaker 1: gave him that computer, word, this is a federal offense.
Speaker 1: Whatever you do, don't do nothing criminal wan, which is
Speaker 1: excellent advice. But with his aunt and dad in prison,
Speaker 1: Packtor and his grandmother had very little money. Who was
Speaker 1: just meeting her surviving off like a boat six months
Speaker 1: as a side check. So it was a tough situation
Speaker 1: and I needed to find way to get a line
Speaker 1: for free. Hector came up with an ingenious and illegal solution.
Speaker 1: He would use other people's a o L accounts to
Speaker 1: get online, either by guessing their passwords or even by
Speaker 1: pretending to be an AOL employee to trick users and
Speaker 1: handing over their personal information. You know what they say,
Speaker 1: like marijuana is a gateway drug, well pastor cracking is
Speaker 1: another gateway drug. I think a lot of us remember
Speaker 1: that moment when we first got dial up internet at
Speaker 1: home and the things that made the Internet feel a
Speaker 1: little magical. Oh. Absolutely. I remember the first time I
Speaker 1: was in university talking with my high school friends that
Speaker 1: were at different colleges around the world. Old and the
Speaker 1: idea of just communicating with them online seemed, you know,
Speaker 1: completely amazing. Yeah, you know. For me, and I'm just
Speaker 1: a couple of years younger than Hector, chatting with my
Speaker 1: friends on a well instant messenger was my thing. But
Speaker 1: for Hector, the Internet was a different kind of toy,
Speaker 1: vast library that he could just get lost in. I
Speaker 1: would wake up in the morning before school, before I
Speaker 1: quit school, and I was just gonna liine and just
Speaker 1: read I'll go to out of Vista dot com because
Speaker 1: Google wasn't that big yet, so he had out of East.
Speaker 1: You had exite. So I'll just type in how to
Speaker 1: hack or Unix or systems administration or whatever. I'll just
Speaker 1: sit there read manuals. That was just reading and reading
Speaker 1: and reading and reading. And then at some point I
Speaker 1: broke into my first system without pastwards, without anything like that,
Speaker 1: and it was a Japanese university server. What was the
Speaker 1: purpose of breaking into that server? So proof a concept?
Speaker 1: Can I do it? And then they became my my
Speaker 1: my test bet right, and I learned so much of
Speaker 1: that system. We should be clear. Hacking into a university
Speaker 1: server is definitely a crime, but Hector is still an
Speaker 1: early teen at this point. Like he loved that there
Speaker 1: was something new that he could focus on and get
Speaker 1: away from the world we was in when he was sixteen.
Speaker 1: Hector's hacking morphed into something different, something more politically charged.
Speaker 1: At the time, in the year two thousand, Puerto Ricans
Speaker 1: were protesting the U. S. Navy for conducting bombing practice
Speaker 1: on the island of Yekes, the exercises that accidentally killed
Speaker 1: a civilian there. Hector, who remembers of Puerto Rican descent
Speaker 1: joined the protests online by hacking into a Puerto Rican
Speaker 1: government server and defacing its website. Sooner after, when Hector's
Speaker 1: grandma was watching TV coverage of the protests, she heard
Speaker 1: something odd. They kept referring to a person called Sabu,
Speaker 1: the online pseudonym that Hector it started going by. The
Speaker 1: name was a reference to a particularly vicious wrestler, and
Speaker 1: she knew that I was calling myself Sabu. So she
Speaker 1: came to me and she was like, what are you doing.
Speaker 1: What's your name? I said, Look, man, I don't know.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm in a way. I'm I'm a rebel
Speaker 1: trying to be a rebel. Okay, I'm trying to be
Speaker 1: checking Vara. You know, my mother's fear was that they
Speaker 1: were retaliated, come come looking for him. You know, that
Speaker 1: was always a fear of everything. She tried to give
Speaker 1: me a fline. She would like, disconnect the computer. I
Speaker 1: was sleeping, and because I never saved anything, Hector didn't listen.
Speaker 1: And his aunt, who is probably the only other person
Speaker 1: who could have stopped him, was still in prison trying
Speaker 1: to avoid getting into any more trouble herself. So every
Speaker 1: time he came to talk to me, I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to know please, I don't want to
Speaker 1: know us because the only person I have told him
Speaker 1: that was his adrenal room. Shortainly after the Vikes hack
Speaker 1: in the ninth grade, Hector dropped out of school. He
Speaker 1: said he was depressed, missing his dad and his aunt
Speaker 1: who were still in prison, living under financial strain, and
Speaker 1: as he got more isolated in the real world, Hector
Speaker 1: sought a community online. One day, he was approached by
Speaker 1: the guy who ran the underground hacker group Hackwiser. He
Speaker 1: was really cool, probably one of the coolest people have
Speaker 1: ever met on the Internet. And he's like, yeah, Sabo,
Speaker 1: Like I wanting to participate, and you know, we got
Speaker 1: some stuff coming up soon after. This happened late Saturday
Speaker 1: night in Washington Sunday morning in China. A United States
Speaker 1: Enable Maritime Patrol aircraft on a routine surveillance mission in
Speaker 1: international airspace over the South China Sea collided with one
Speaker 1: of two Chinese fighters that were shadowing our plane. Both
Speaker 1: our aircraft and a Chinese aircraft. The collision killed the
Speaker 1: Chinese pilot and the American plane was forced to make
Speaker 1: an emergency landing, the Chinese government refused to release the
Speaker 1: plane's American crew until President George Bush apologized. The showdown
Speaker 1: led to a bizarre skirmish where Chinese hackers hacked US
Speaker 1: government websites and left politically charged messages on them, and
Speaker 1: so all they got all the US hackers were like,
Speaker 1: all right, we gotta do something too, We have to
Speaker 1: we have to fight back, and uh, we just learted
Speaker 1: hacking the out of Chinese government websites. So you're kind
Speaker 1: of like a rogue cyber warrior basically for the United States.
Speaker 1: A few years later, in two thousand two, Hector's aunt
Speaker 1: and dad were released from prison. With his family back,
Speaker 1: Hector's life came to resemble something much closer to the
Speaker 1: lives of other teenagers his age. He started taking more
Speaker 1: time away from the computer, attending protests in real life
Speaker 1: on the streets where he met student activists at the
Speaker 1: local universities, just hanging out with him at mcsorley's over there,
Speaker 1: and you know by Saint Mark's and um, just hanging
Speaker 1: out the bars in the back, just drinking and talking
Speaker 1: about politics. He even got legit jobs as a system administrator,
Speaker 1: which is essentially like an I t guy, and that
Speaker 1: was a different person. You know, I was just working
Speaker 1: and living life. I would still dabble here and there.
Speaker 1: It is in order for you to to maintain your
Speaker 1: experience and skills, you obviously have to continue, right, But
Speaker 1: I wasn't doing act of his operations like I used
Speaker 1: to it. During his pause on his high profile hacks,
Speaker 1: Hector helped start a computer security firm with a Swedish
Speaker 1: business partner. They secured some clients in the Nordic region,
Speaker 1: but the business folded shortly after. Then he got a
Speaker 1: job at a nonprofit earning a hundred thousand dollar salary.
Speaker 1: But life was about to get a lot tough. That's
Speaker 1: coming up. Welcome back. We left her story with things
Speaker 1: looking up for Hector, but by the late two thousand's,
Speaker 1: Hector's grandma was sick with the worsening case of diabetes.
Speaker 1: She could barely get out of bed. Hector was her caretaker. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: Hector's aunt had gone back to dealing heroin. In two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, she got arrested again. She had two young
Speaker 1: daughters who were three and five years old, and with
Speaker 1: his aunt gun, it was up to Hector to raise
Speaker 1: the girls. Did you feel ready for that responsibility to
Speaker 1: become a father. Over night us insane. By the spring
Speaker 1: of two thousand ten, between taking care of the girls
Speaker 1: and taking care of his grandmother, Hector couldn't make a
Speaker 1: normal office job work. He lost his job at the
Speaker 1: nonpro off it, and then he lost his grandmother. He
Speaker 1: was twenty six at the time. Her dying is just
Speaker 1: like I couldn't even cry. I was just like, wow,
Speaker 1: I can't believe in why this, Why me? Where is
Speaker 1: she gone? But then you had to come to the realization,
Speaker 1: dude's been sick for ten years. I was there at
Speaker 1: home with the kids. We were as low as possible.
Speaker 1: Trust me when I tell you were really, really low.
Speaker 1: Um that's the lowest ever been because I had the girls.
Speaker 1: But then what times I was scared, I couldn't be
Speaker 1: I couldn't feed them. You know that's why spiral. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's when I really lost it and I just started
Speaker 1: hacking the planet man m Some of Hector's hacks came
Speaker 1: out of these destitute times. On a few occasions, he
Speaker 1: hacked a company that sold auto parts. So, for example,
Speaker 1: someone didn't order for a car motor and the destination
Speaker 1: was Connecticut I would change the destination to a location
Speaker 1: in New York, and I would pick up the motor
Speaker 1: and and I sold them and just bold the kids
Speaker 1: food and both crayons and coloring books. But most of
Speaker 1: Hector's hacks were far more ambitious in their scope. And
Speaker 1: those hacks were sparked by a video that Wiki Leaks
Speaker 1: published online in April two five and individuals Roger that
Speaker 1: so the views from a US Army helicopter, and you
Speaker 1: can see the gun's cross hairs in the middle of
Speaker 1: the frame. You hear the American soldiers aboard discussing the
Speaker 1: group of men they see below. All right, we got
Speaker 1: a guy with an rpgre walking and the helicopter who
Speaker 1: starts praying them with bullets. Pretty graphic. You're seeing arms,
Speaker 1: heads ripped off. You're like, damn, it's pretty tough. But
Speaker 1: this guy's gotta be terrorists. Two of the people who
Speaker 1: are shot for journalists with the news agency Reuters. US
Speaker 1: soldiers mistook their camera equipment for weapons. The video sparked
Speaker 1: public outrage, it became a rallying cry for the hacker
Speaker 1: group Anonymous, and it reignited something within Hector. It really
Speaker 1: bothered me because here in New York growing up. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna I'm not gonna talk too bad about the NYPD,
Speaker 1: but I've seen stuff these cops have done. I guess
Speaker 1: people in authority, right, they have a gun, they feel
Speaker 1: like they have the authority to shoot first, ask questions later.
Speaker 1: And you had no idea if the guys with journalists
Speaker 1: or not. And he just shot him. And but you
Speaker 1: don't really killed me. Watching the ambulance, right, you saw
Speaker 1: the guy with the van. He tried to swop people
Speaker 1: who that were still alive come on and make his
Speaker 1: blew them up with his kids. I mean, that was
Speaker 1: tough to watch. Claire. With the renewed drive to act,
Speaker 1: Hector wanted to do something, and he went on a
Speaker 1: hunt to join Anonymous, which was gaining notoriety at the time.
Speaker 1: He watched the YouTube videos posted by the group, which
Speaker 1: took him to the website for Chan, where he found
Speaker 1: the links to join Anonymous. Is online chat forums on
Speaker 1: i r C, which stands for Internet Relay Chat right.
Speaker 1: The i r C was sort of an Internet wide
Speaker 1: bulletin board. You can almost think of it like a
Speaker 1: big version of Slack where you can join individual channels.
Speaker 1: De voted to different topics, and this is where he
Speaker 1: found the Hackers channel. And Hector got approached by a
Speaker 1: guy who went by the handle T Flow. Yes, Hector,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to join a secretive hacker club. Hector
Speaker 1: said yes, So Andy invite me to have grew a
Speaker 1: room called Internet Fats, and Internet Fairs was full of
Speaker 1: like all the big names, so anonymous. At the time,
Speaker 1: it was deep place to be in. Earlier we heard
Speaker 1: Hector talk about hacking the planet. You can take that
Speaker 1: pretty literally. I've done a lot of hacks. I've I've
Speaker 1: done thousands of hacks. I've done hacks so big that
Speaker 1: you will never know. I can never discuss it. But
Speaker 1: out of out of everything that you know and with
Speaker 1: the media knows, with the public knows, one of the
Speaker 1: bigger hacks is average spring stuff. This he's referring to
Speaker 1: is the Tunisian uprising of eleven, which went on to
Speaker 1: spark similar protests across the Arab world. The people's protests
Speaker 1: are in no way cooling down, even as the politicians
Speaker 1: agreed on plans for a coalition government including the opposition.
Speaker 1: I don't want other is berracious were but I saw
Speaker 1: the Tunisian situation as something that could change history. They
Speaker 1: could probably cause a chain reaction in the Middle East
Speaker 1: and get rid of a lot of the dictators that
Speaker 1: were there. And I thought, you know what, I could
Speaker 1: probably help these people. So Hector and a number of
Speaker 1: Anonymous hackers attacked the Tunisian government's network, disrupting officials email
Speaker 1: and defacing the Prime Minister's website. Hector joined similar attacks
Speaker 1: on other authoritarian regimes, including the governments of Algeria, Yemen,
Speaker 1: and Zimbabwe. And then there were Anonymous as less worldly hacks.
Speaker 1: The group punished companies that had shunned wiki leaks. For example,
Speaker 1: when PayPal, Visa and master Cards started blocking donations to
Speaker 1: wiki leaks, the Anonymous hackers slowed or knocked offline their websites.
Speaker 1: But perhaps the group's most brazen attack during this time
Speaker 1: was an act of revenge. It was against the guy
Speaker 1: called Aaron Bar. He was the CEO of HB Gary
Speaker 1: Federal Now HB Gary is a cyber security firm that
Speaker 1: offers protection to corporations and governments from cyber attack. Bar
Speaker 1: threatened Anonymous by telling The Financial Times he had collected
Speaker 1: information on their core leaders, including many of their real names.
Speaker 1: The response was swift. Anonymous took down their website, stole
Speaker 1: thousands of emails and posted them on the internet. The
Speaker 1: CEO resigned. I remember this story. Aaron Barr's boss got
Speaker 1: a lot of attention. It was it was just the
Speaker 1: hubrist of it all, and then of course it all
Speaker 1: came back to bite him. I even remember writing a
Speaker 1: Business Week article about it at the time. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: made the hack extra risky wasn't just the publicity it generated.
Speaker 1: Hector and I talked about this over lunch at a
Speaker 1: diner where he'd order these big breakfasts to wind down
Speaker 1: after an all night hacking spree. I was like, Wow,
Speaker 1: I really lost the boundary, Like I really went too far.
Speaker 1: The HP guy was a federal contractor, that's a core
Speaker 1: US asset. UM, and you like had the girls at
Speaker 1: that point, right, so like, but you didn't think, like, wow,
Speaker 1: I should really stop before I get so I got
Speaker 1: the kids, I was already involved in other hacking operations.
Speaker 1: It was just so late. I could have slowed it down.
Speaker 1: You're right, and that's definitely mistake. That's definitely something that
Speaker 1: I admit, Like I could have stopped, um, I would
Speaker 1: have got arrested. Either way, but I could at least
Speaker 1: stopped and maybe lessen the blow. Um, but I was
Speaker 1: I was at the point, at least I felt like
Speaker 1: I was at the point of no return. And uh,
Speaker 1: sometimes you know, agatting part of my language, because sometimes
Speaker 1: you have a moment. Right as this was all going down,
Speaker 1: his aunt was still in prison. One time, Hector visited
Speaker 1: with her daughters and his friends. The friend that accompanied
Speaker 1: him up to that visit told me, you need to
Speaker 1: hurry up and come home. There's a lot of things
Speaker 1: going on that I can't tell you. And having him
Speaker 1: tell me that was enough for me to be like,
Speaker 1: what could possibly be going on? And then I was
Speaker 1: getting little bits and pieces like from my aunts that
Speaker 1: they would try to meet up with him or see
Speaker 1: my daughters or something, and there's a bad We don't
Speaker 1: know what Pop is doing, but you know something's not right,
Speaker 1: but nobody could tell me specifically what it was. In
Speaker 1: May two thleven, Hector embarked on what would be his
Speaker 1: final hacking spring. It was a situation where the last
Speaker 1: of us, the last of the Internet fens, we were
Speaker 1: in a room by ourselves. We had survived a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of drama and arguing and fighting. So it was
Speaker 1: just a six which was me um Kayla, t Flow, Topiary,
Speaker 1: pone Source, and Ava Unit. They called themselves low Seck
Speaker 1: lowsper laughs SEC for security. There's a group of young
Speaker 1: guys making fun of the cybersecurity industry. Each day they
Speaker 1: hacked the different entity companies like Sony Pictures, PBS, Nintendo,
Speaker 1: And they didn't do it quietly. They published press releases
Speaker 1: to take credit for the attacks, and in the day
Speaker 1: they dubbed f FBI Friday. You can just imagine what
Speaker 1: that first F stands for. Low Sec even hacked the
Speaker 1: Atlanta chapter of an organization affiliated with the FBI called
Speaker 1: Infra Guard. The hackers stole and released logging credentials, passwords,
Speaker 1: and other confidential information. They also defaced the chapter's website,
Speaker 1: posting a YouTube video with words above it that said,
Speaker 1: in all caps, let it flow, you stupid FBI battleships.
Speaker 1: But once I did defacement and people started commenting on it,
Speaker 1: what ended up getting more comments about how I'm going
Speaker 1: down in the worst possible way. They're gonna get you now,
Speaker 1: like you you really screwed up. You're gonna found out
Speaker 1: that infant guard was really deeply embedded into the FBI.
Speaker 1: And so over the next few days, I was paranoid.
Speaker 1: I wiped my laptop. I sat there playing with the kids,
Speaker 1: and every day I will take him to church, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I started seeing con Edison trucks parked out
Speaker 1: from in front of my own building. It was just
Speaker 1: bizarre people hiding in vans with paperwork peeking at me.
Speaker 1: It was a balmy evening. On June seven eleven, exactly
Speaker 1: one year after his grandmother's death, Hector went to a
Speaker 1: local right aid, bought the girls coloring books and toys,
Speaker 1: and dropped them off at church. He wanted to get
Speaker 1: them out of the apartment, the same apartment where a
Speaker 1: decade and a half earlier, he once watched the cops
Speaker 1: holloway his grandmother. He says, he sensed what was about
Speaker 1: to happen next, and then they said police, said police,
Speaker 1: what the police don't here. When opened the door, I
Speaker 1: see the whole FBI squad just in there. They said,
Speaker 1: come on, step out of the door. At the door
Speaker 1: was Chris Tarbell, a young special agent, and the FBI's
Speaker 1: elite cyber squad. A handful of other agents were there. Too.
Speaker 1: One of them said, we know you are dude, I
Speaker 1: know you're sad, but I'm like, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: who that is. And I knew it Any really had
Speaker 1: me um, but I was trying to burn some time,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what could with these kids. With
Speaker 1: his aunt in prison his grandmother dead, Pector was a
Speaker 1: sole guardian of his young cousins. More than anything else,
Speaker 1: he worried about the FBI calling child services. These little girls.
Speaker 1: I cannot allow them to go into forced to care.
Speaker 1: I got to do everything in my power to make
Speaker 1: sure they stay with me because and my new We're
Speaker 1: told about a split second. But for that split second,
Speaker 1: and my brain was like a week. He didn't know
Speaker 1: what to do, so Hector let the agents into his apartment.
Speaker 1: They sat around his kitchen table. Hector stalled them, continuing
Speaker 1: to deny that he was Sabu. So the agents brought
Speaker 1: up some damning evidence they'd uncovered through a search warrant
Speaker 1: for his Facebook account. On Facebook, Hector had sent a
Speaker 1: relative a list of other people's credit card numbers that
Speaker 1: he'd obtained. That's a serious crime, and it was enough
Speaker 1: for the FBI to arrest him. But the agents wanted
Speaker 1: something more, and when he said, how about you just
Speaker 1: come downtown, you know, let's figure this out together. I
Speaker 1: knew I had leverage as something. I said, all right,
Speaker 1: I'll do that. We're gonna eat the kids here with
Speaker 1: my brother and um, Chris Tarbell, he's all over an
Speaker 1: FBI just I can actually mention his name. He was
Speaker 1: a gentleman. He said, okay, he's going to leave the
Speaker 1: kids here with your brother, and you're gonna come down
Speaker 1: with us. Who would have figured this out. The agents
Speaker 1: arrested Hector and right around midnight took him to the
Speaker 1: FBI's office at twenty six Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan.
Speaker 1: At the FBI's office, Hector didn't even asked for a lawyer.
Speaker 1: He was still terrified of losing custody of his young
Speaker 1: cousins and he wanted to make every show of cooperating.
Speaker 1: When I got downtown, I said, look, here's what I know.
Speaker 1: Exploits zero days um attack methodology. I know how anonymous works,
Speaker 1: and it works really bad. It's not sophisticated. Trust me, Um,
Speaker 1: I'm the most sophisticated hacker there. Look at me, Um,
Speaker 1: you know high school dropout, right, So Uh, but they
Speaker 1: were more curious about, like how these centralized organizations work. UM.
Speaker 1: They were really curious if I was really decentralized, which
Speaker 1: I've told you no, they're not what they weren't. Um.
Speaker 1: They were curious about how we're doing these fast paced,
Speaker 1: UM sophisticated hacks or high profile hacks. And I explained
Speaker 1: to them it was easy. I did most of them.
Speaker 1: And that's when they hit me. And he said, okay,
Speaker 1: well you admitted these times were gonna have to charge
Speaker 1: you with these climes. Uh so I do you had that?
Speaker 1: I was a gunner. I was dead, you know, I
Speaker 1: was done. But Hector had a lifeline. How we avoided
Speaker 1: a one twenty four year prison sentence and its long
Speaker 1: road to redemption that's coming in part two of this episode.
Speaker 1: If you subscribe to our show, it's already in your feet.