What do you think of when you think of the government? Do
you think of greed, corruption, and wasteful spending, or do you think of
pride, liberty, and equality? Chances are if you think of the latter you may
feel that hacking into the government would be fun and prove a point that they
are not as powerful as they make themselves out to be. These feelings of
distrust can be seen in the eyes of many hackers that make it a point to take
down .gov websites.
Jeremy Hammond felt that way and wanted to take down those
sites and all that were connected to the government.
The early years
Hammond grew up with his twin brother, in a pretty regular
home in a Chicago suburb of Glendale Heights. If by pretty regular, you mean
growing up with a father that was a self-proclaimed “nonconformist” who had a
real problem with authority. This served as perfect proving grounds for a
hacktivist like Jeremy. In a recent interview with the Associated Press,
Hammond described his life growing up and his passion for exposing security
flaws and disrupting the government. He claimed that when 9/11 happened, at the
age of 16, it gave him a “… sense of duty to take action.”
He saw the US Government’s responses to the attacks as
“police state measures” and wanted to prove a point. You could say that both
nature and nurture had something to do with the way he felt about the
government and their actions. While in high school, he and his brother staged a
walk-out and protest against the war in Iraq and later in life, while on a full
ride at the University of Illinois at Chicago, hacked into the university’s
computer sciences website and exposed the vulnerabilities to the school only to
be expelled.
You could say that he was fueled by both anarchy and
heroism.
While attending the university and taking down their
website, he also fed the homeless regularly and set up a free public computer
lab. This heroism could also be seen later in his hacktivist career by using
stolen credit cards to donate to the Red Cross.
The start of
something bigger
By the age of 19, he
had made a name for himself and made a public pledge at DEFCON, a hacking
conference, to engage in a campaign of “electronic civil disobedience” and
attack the Republic National Convention in New York.
By this point, Hammond had not only built a name for himself
in the hacking community, but also with the police and was arrested at both a
Neo-Nazi rally and again for fighting with a team of anti-gay protestors at the
Chicago Pride Parade. For these actions, he was sentenced to 20 months in
prison where his rage against the machine grew. Once out of prison, he was
right back to his anarchist ways and joined local public protests and honed his
skills as a hacker, all while maintaining a regular full time job as a
programmer at an advertising agency.
As his skills grew, he decided to take his
anti-establishment stance to the internet and started looking to really shake
things up by taking down some of the nation’s .gov websites.
“Anarchaos” and “Crediblethreat”
While working his 9-5 job, he was moonlighting as a hacker,
sitting in a vacant building with nearby Wi-Fi access, breaking into US
Government websites and the private intelligence firm Stratfor. Hammond gained
the most notoriety from the Stratfor incident due to exposing the information
on the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. To prevent exposing himself as a
hacker, he used Tor which would hide his IP address and also use the alias’ of
“Anarchaos” and “Crediblethreat.”
On March 5, 2012, three months after the Strafor incident,
Hammond was hanging out smoking a joint and chatting with friends when his
front door was knocked down. The hunter now became the hunted, a flash bang was
thrown into his house and he ran for his bedroom to shut his encrypted Mac.
This time Hammond was not as lucky as his past run-ins with
the law; he was arrested by FBI Agents and was one of six people that were
arraigned on charges of breaking into Stratfor. The case against Hammond was
very interesting because the presiding judge, Loretta A. Preska, whose husband
worked at Stratfor had been affected by the data breach. Hammond’s legal team
filed a motion to remove Preska from the case due to conflict of interest; this
motion was denied.
Hammond ultimately was sentenced to 10 years in prison for
the crimes he committed in this case.
Weak Passwords
Hackers pride themselves on praying on those with weak
passwords, however in the case of Hammond, it was a weak password that did him
in.
“My password was really weak.”
It was his cat’s name and a few numbers.
“Chewy123”
Hammond is still by all means a young man, just shy of 30
years of age. He will be eligible for release in 2023. The question is, when he
is relieved from his sentence, will he be a reformed white hat hacker or continue
his life of crime?
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment