How I Hacked The US Government Aged 16 | Minutes With | @LADbible TV

every time they arrest you they have to question you they have to say something like you you are not under arrest for this um you do not have to say anything but if you fail to say something that you later rely on in court then this may harm your defense because i was charged with 80 different crimes because they basically made like each hack a different crime they were supposed to arrest me 80 times but they could they only finished arresting me about 40 times because they could only keep me in custody for 24 hours [Music] when i was a child i spent most of my time on a computer so if i wasn't for playing games i would be trying to go into all these different programs on the computer to see what they do and one of them was a this really old program called microsoft front page which allows you to create websites when you create that website is you basically it's kind of like editing a word document and you can actually see the code behind that website you created and that's kind of how i first picked up programming and that's where my interest in technology and computers really kicked off how old were you when you were doing this and this was when i was roughly nine years old so i think my first experience of a hack was when i didn't have a calculator with me but i was trying to do my maths homework so i went online and i went i found the online calculator having programming knowledge in my head i kind of thought about the most obvious way that the person made this calculator because i programmed it this calculator had a security hole in it where you could basically type computer codes into this calculator and you can hack the entire website through this to this malicious or broken calculator and that was kind of my first experience of realizing that um very simple programming mistakes could do a lot of damage and could potentially allow a hacker to get in and take take control over everything i also tried to hack my school computers and servers and they were quite poorly protected so for example i managed to get into a private file server and find the salary of all the teachers and people's exam grades and stuff like that and how did the school react to that they didn't really take it very well at all because they kind of thought i was trying to blackmail them obviously hacking's portrayed a lot of movies yeah so have any movies done well and what movies have done it badly like most movies and tv shows don't do it well at all and like they do it in a completely ridiculous way and like they have all these 3d graphics and interfaces which are completely unrealistic like when you hack it's just like black terminal with white text that's what that's what hacking looks like it's actually quite boring but some tv shows actually do do it very realistically like mr robot i think has been the most realistic in terms of portraying hacking like the actual hacks they do are real hacks on exploits when did you first start to become aware of anonymous as a group i started becoming aware of anonymous as a collective of people when i started hanging around various online chat rooms associated with these online activists and eventually kind of evolved into a wider activist campaign under the banner of anonymous obviously people have their own nicknames in these chat rooms so it's not as if each person is calling themselves anonymous it's more that we're actually acting collectively under the kind of flag of anonymous there is no formal hierarchy there's no leaders but there's a kind of fluid kind of chaotic hierarchy in the sense that it's a democracy so if you do something and people like it then they'll come and help you with that and if they don't like that then no one will join so it's kind of a democracy and a meritocracy in some way um in the sense that the best ideas win and you don't need leaders to choose which ideas um should have merit or not anonymous movements were against the entertainment industry at this point that i thought that was their name for focusing on yeah that's what they were focusing on at the time and then it kind of evolved into other campaigns for example when uh visa and mastercard shut services off to weak leaks uh to stop quick leaks from receiving uh donations anonymous um launched a denial of service attack against mastercard and visa so can you tell me about one of the first attacks you were involved with under the banner of anonymous one of the kind of first hacks that we did is we participated during the arab spring when egypt was having a revolution and tunisia as well and for example we hacked the prime minister um of tunisia and replaced his front page with a kind of like a message to support the revolution so how did you do this let's explain how would you do something like that so what a lot of the hacks that we did were very simple in the sense that it wasn't really to show that we were master hackers but more that the companies that we were hacking had very poor security so this there's a few very common hacking vulnerabilities that were quite common at the time one of them is for example called sql injection which is to deal with the way that a website is programmed and how it accesses its internal database and if it's not programmed correctly then you can basically hack the entire database and change things so when you hack a company's database you might come across passwords and when you crack those passwords you might find out that people are using the same password everywhere so for example with one company hacked um their ceo was using the same password for his email company account his paypal account his world of warcraft account and pretty much every single account so we managed to get access to his entire online life because he was using the same password everywhere he was a ceo of a us defense contractor called hp gary federal when we hacked um hp gary federal's emails it was exposed that they were up to a lot of no good in the sense that one of the things that they were trying to do is blackmail american journalists that support the weak leaks and so that's kind of when i realized that information can give people a lot of power or can change the world and then you're one of the finest six core members of lulz is it a little stick doll sick yeah so what is lost so dulcek was a group that i co-founded that was born off anonymous and the reason why i i proposed the idea of lolzic was because what happened was that a lot of people were hacking lots of different things anonymous and we're finding all of these security availabilities in all these companies but there wasn't necessarily a good reason to actually exploit this vulnerabilities in the sense that there was no political or activist reason to expose those vulnerabilities or to hack those companies and i didn't really want people to hack those companies under the banner of anonymous if there wasn't a political or activist reason to do so so we created this alternative kind of banner or hacking kind of group called lalsec where we would just like dump or hack companies in there um that we didn't necessarily have a kind of activist reason to hack to kind of separate those two concerns we hacked fox for example and that was done under the lawsuit banner to be leaked the x factor contestants database so there isn't really a political reason to leak the x factor's contestant database so that's why i didn't want people to be doing that kind of thing under the banner of anonymous and then what did you do use international remember so like i wasn't directly involved in the news international act because at that time i was taking a break from lolsic but zalzek found a security probability in the sun and this was just around the time that the news of the world hacking scandal was happening so there was a really good reason to hack the sun and so we had the sun and we put up a fake news article on there saying that rupert murdoch was found dead in his garden um i think was something to do with palladium poisoning and a lot of people on the internet reflect that we gained something like 150 000 followers there was we hacked into an fbi affiliate organization and leaked fbi agent usernames and passwords we hacked into the arizona police department the u.s senate uh what else there's like a whole list of them what how old are you at this point yeah 15 16 at the time 15 16 you're hacking the us senate yeah but at this point actually most of our hacks didn't even come from us at this point we're just getting so much attention but other hackers were giving us stuff that hacked for us to release so we're kind of becoming weak leaks for hackers at that point you got into trouble with the police how did that come about so eventually i left lulzig because it was kind of getting a bit repetitive at the time and about a month after that um i was sitting on my computer one day in my room and i hear a knock on the door so there was about three police officers in um playing clothes clothing and i kind of like rushed into the into the flat and they came into my room and immediately knew that i was the one they were looking for probably because of my age and i just kind of sat in my room for three hours as i watched them try to search my whole room for any kind of like usb sticks or laptops then i was taken to a belgravia police station in london every time they arrest you they have to caution you they have to say something like you you are not under arrest for this and you do not have to say anything but if you fail to say something that you later rely on in court then this may harm your defense because i was charged with 80 different crimes because they basically made like each hack a different crime they were supposed to arrest me 80 times but they could they only finished arresting me about 40 times because they could only keep me in custody for 24 hours they had all these questions for me and they were hoping that i would basically reveal to them what i did or try to snitch on all the people in the group i didn't i just like every question they would ask i would say no comment because that's what i was advised to do by my lawyer at the time and they were really not expecting that i think as because i was under 18 they thought i would talk and um they kind of tried to threaten me to say if you talk if you don't talk then you know you might be extradited to the us were you scared i wasn't scared because i knew as a 16 year old like the chances of wearing the gel are very slim because they have different sentencing guidelines for under-18s and i wasn't aware of any like hacker under 18 in the uk um you know being going to jail for something like that so i wasn't really kind of scared i was more kind of like um kind of pissed off that i was arrested than scared about a year into the case it turned out that one of our the members in the group so there were six members in the group and one of them was living in new york and he was arrested and later flipped to be an fbi informant and the fbi had basically a copy of everything that we typed the chat rooms so like the evidence was too strong so we had to please guilty so i was the only one that was sentenced to a non-constitutional sentence because i was on anyone under 18. i was sentenced to a 20-month jail sentence that was suspended which means that i have to serve it unless i commit another crime and then i was also sentenced to 320 hours of community service which i served in a charity shop that sold clothes for deaf blind people there's one more thing that's interesting about your sentence is that you were given a two-year internet ban so after i was arrested when i was released on bail part of my bowel conditions was that i was not supposed to use any device that had access to the internet and i was not supposed to use the internet but nowadays they didn't do that because they realized that accessing the internet is basically essential to participate in society nowadays how did they police that i mean they couldn't actively police my branding from the internet because the only way they would tell is if i went on facebook for example and i started you know messages messaging people on facebook and made it really obvious but if i just like did a google search or something they probably wouldn't know so as part of my sentence i had to email the police every time i for example bought a new computer or dispose of the computer and also i was um not allowed to use encryption for anything except for work or educational purposes and that was an order that lasted for five years what's the state of hacktivism in 2021 so anonymous isn't as active as it used to be since i was arrested there was a lot of activity and anonymous also kind of spread to other parts of the world like asia and latin america and there's also lots of spin-offs of lots of there has been lots of activism since then but more by individuals and lone actors rather than by groups of people like anonymous he gestured at me just as i was holding the phone trying to get through to the office in london uh with his gun and he cocked his kalashnikov in very aggressive fashion uh waved at me and it was pretty clear that what he was intending to do or threatening to do uh was wait until i was on the phone to the office and then he was gonna either fire the gun right beside me or belt me in the face with a gun or something

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Keywords: the lad bible, lad bible, lad, bible, videos, viral videos, viral, funny, comedy, funny videos, documentaries, exclusives, interviews, journalism, culture, anonymous hacking, anonymous hacker real story, lulzsec, lulzsec documentary, news of the world hacking, lulzsec hacks, hacker interview, westboro baptist church, hacking the sun, arrested for hacking, british hacker arrested, cybersecurity documentary, cybersecurity, Mustafa Al-Bassam, guy fawkes mask

Id: HXXoO0FwUKQ

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021