Our Hackers around the world series featured a great interview the other day with 13-year-old Australian hacker s3rver.exe, and after hearing his story, we concluded that he may be the youngest hacker in the world, without counting the ones that consider themselves ethical hackers.
For those who don’t know,
s3rver.exe is the hacker that not long ago breached
Sony Pictures, a couple of
UFC sites, and countless
government websites worldwide.
“I started hacking when I was 11. I heard about Anonymous and then I started DDOS’ing sites,” S3rver said.
In the course of the two years during which he learned many of the secrets behind the
hacking trade, there were a few occasions when older, more experienced hackers, had to get him with his feet on the ground, considering he stepped out of line, but he didn’t give up.
“I thought I was all cool and stuff, like any other beginner does, but then one day I got owned by these black hat guys. They got my IP and booted my internet offline. When I came back online they were like ‘send me $20 on this PayPal’,” he explained.
“I was scared, but then I cracked my neighbor’s Wi-Fi using BackTrack 5 and I booted my own internet off so my IP address changed. Even though I solved this, I felt at the time that I wasn’t too good at hacking.”
This was the point where he decided that he needed to learn more. He started using botnets, he learned about vulnerabilities and started defacing websites, mostly to prove a point.
“I have hacked about 150 websites. 81 of the hacked websites belong to the Brazilian and the US government. I don’t like DDOS'ing that much, but this is the part where I use my botnet,” he revealed in our interview.
S3rver.exe considers himself to be a gray hat who likes to “help people,” even though many would probably catalogue him as a black hat and the fact that he may be the world’s youngest hacker doesn’t scare him at all. On the contrary, he would be honored to bear that title, especially since he hopes to become one of the best.
Currently, he’s a skilled and respected member of Anonymous, helping out with operations wherever he is needed, his latest hacks targeting a couple of Romanian government sites in
OpStopACTA, USA.gov, and a few sites as part of Occupy Oakland.
The purpose of this article is not to encourage hacking, or hackers, instead it’s meant as more of a wake-up call. In the days when kids are born with a computer in their lap, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that not all of them embrace ethical hacking, or use their knowledge and skills for the right purposes (legally speaking).
Hackers always say that security is an illusion and many regular Internet users don’t even remotely understand the concept of cyber security. However, hackers like
s3rver.exe and the ones that will follow, will show each and every one of us that even though online security can never be bulletproof, it can never hurt to know a thing or two.
Naturally, few will trust the advice given by a security expert, many still believing that viruses and hackers can’t affect them, but after their company’s website goes down, or their bank account gets emptied, one by one people will begin to better understand the concept of online security.
You can read the complete interview with s3rver.exe
here.
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