JACK: In 2014, a five-year-old hacked Xbox Live. A five year old! Ya. Here’s
what happened; [MUSIC] the family got an Xbox for Christmas. The five-year-old was having fun
playing games, and dad set it up with parental controls so the kid could only play a few games
that were set aside for him. But the kid saw some of the other games that dad was playing
and wanted to play those, too. He tried to get to those other games, but he couldn’t;
it was locked by dad. But the kid didn’t stop trying. He understood that there were
two different accounts; one for kids and one for dad. So, he clicked on his dad’s account which
prompted the kid for a password. The kid didn’t know the password. Heck, he was five years old,
so he didn’t even know how to spell even if he knew the password. But when he got to the
password screen, the kid just hit space bar a bunch of times; tap, tap tap, then Enter,
and magically, it worked. Apparently there was a vulnerability in the Xbox parental controls that
allowed someone to just type in all spaces to get out of the kid’s account, and the kid got
into his dad’s games and played them. When the kid could play his dad’s games, this is what he said.
KID: I was like, yeah!
JACK: He played them, wasn’t very good at it, but then shut them off and went and did something else
without his dad knowing, that little sneaker. Then he did it again another day. He bypassed
parental controls, played the game he wasn’t supposed to, and then shut it off before his dad
found out. But then his dad noticed someone was playing his games and was like, that’s odd. So,
he asked the kid, hey, were you playing my stuff? The kid started to worry a little.
KID: I got nervous. He was gonna find out.
JACK: His dad realized the kid must be breaking out of the parental controls
and asked him to demonstrate how he did it. [INTRO MUSIC] So, the kid showed dad how you
could just mash the space key a whole bunch of times to get to the other games. His dad
was dumbfounded and they reported this bug to Microsoft who fixed it, and they even credited
the kid in the bug report as a security researcher involved with identifying it.
(INTRO): These are true stories from the dark side
of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: This is the wild and strange story of Mr. Daniel Kelley.
DANIEL: So, I think it’s important to go back to 2013, 2014, because that’s when a lot of
this started that led up to the events that took place. I had a normal childhood. I really disliked
school, had really low attendance, and my life pretty much resolved around online games. So,
I’d go to school, I’d come home, I’d play online games, and I’d basically do the same
thing for months on end. I used to be obsessed with a certain game called World of Warcraft.
On World of Warcraft, essentially, you had a PvP system. I used to take this game really serious.
JACK: I picture you as a rogue. When you were telling me this story, I was like,
this guy is definitely a rogue and he’s a griefer; I can tell already.
DANIEL: No, no, that’s not true. I had a few characters,
actually. I used to play a lot of healers. My main character was a Holy Paladin,
but then I played Resto Druid for a bit. That’s pretty much all I used to play, was healers.
JACK: I just don’t picture you as either a paladin or a druid. That’s so funny.
DANIEL: Yeah.
JACK: Daniel played a lot of World of Warcraft for thousands of hours, and during this time,
he was really working hard to rank up in PvP. This is player versus player skirmishes,
where he’d get in a group of other players and battle against other
players to see who was better. He was very high-ranked and very competitive,
spending as much time as possible playing this game. Because he was high-ranked, he would often
compete against the same teams who were around his rank. One day, he got a strange message.
DANIEL: Before the match started, I received an in-game message which basically said something
like goodbye. [MUSIC] The game started, and my internet disconnected. At the time, I didn’t
even realize that I had received the message. It was only when I went back for my chat logs did
I see the message. Basically, we get to a point where we’d queue against the same team so much,
and someone on my team would always go offline. It would either be me or it would either be one
of my teammates. It got to a point where I ultimately realized that we have no chance
of winning whatsoever. So, I called one of the members of this specific team and asked them
what they were doing, and they sort of made a joke out of it. They didn’t admit that they
were doing anything, but they didn’t say that they weren’t doing anything. So, after a while,
I sort of – I went to Google and I started to search how to cheat on this game, basically.
JACK: He found a forum that talked about the different kinds of cheats and hacks. He gets on
the forum and asks them what could have caused him to be disconnected just before a match started.
DANIEL: I basically explained everything and I saw – asked people to make a suggestion on
what he could be doing. A lot of people started saying that there was a high
probability that I was being DDossed. Back then, I was like, twelve years old,
so I really didn’t understand the concept and I was not familiar with this at all.
JACK: So, he looks up what DDoS is and finds it stands for distributed denial of service,
and this typically means flooding someone with so much traffic that they cannot get
to the internet anymore; service is denied. Okay, that made sense. Someone may be flooding
him with tons of packets and that made him go offline. Then he found what a booter was,
which is a type of hacking tool that does this kind of DDoS attack. All you had to do
was enter the victim’s IP address, and you could blast them off the internet.
But what didn’t make sense to him was how did anyone know his IP address to attack
him basically at home? There’s nothing in the game that would show his IP to anyone.
DANIEL: So, I sort of interacted with the people that posted on that thread and asked
them if they had any theories behind how he may be getting my IP address.
JACK: They came back and asked well, have you talked with any of your attackers over Skype
in the past? [MUSIC] Yeah, he had. Remember? He even called the guy up who he thought did
this and asked him about it. Well, as it turns out, back then when you called someone on Skype,
it would store their IP address on your computer. Then when hackers figured that out,
they created a little tool called the Skype Resolver, and with this little tool,
all you had to do is enter someone’s Skype username and it would try to call them and
then tell you what IP address they had. So now he knows exactly what tools they used to
find him and kick him offline. So, now that he knows how it’s done, he gives it a try.
DANIEL: This is pretty much what I was doing when I was like, twelve. So, I had a booter
and Skype Resolver, and I decided to test this theory. So, one night we queue against this team,
I get his IP address, and I DDoS him. It basically worked. We won and I sort of
realized that this is what he had been doing all along, because the effects were exactly
the same. At the very beginning, I only used to use it against their team, and I – to be honest,
I didn’t even tell the other two players what I was doing because I didn’t want them to know. It
was really tempting to do it to every single team that we queued into, but I didn’t do that because
I had essentially achieved where I was through hard work and skill, and not cheating. So,
I wasn’t about to ruin all the time that I had spent learning just so that I could cheat.
JACK: He wasn’t using this attack that much, but with this knowledge of what it
looks like when someone is attacked, he started noticing this happening more often. In fact,
a lot of the top-ranked teams had been using booters to force people to leave just when a
match would begin so they could win easier. This ruined the fun and the game for him, so he started
playing it less. But what this all did was it sparked his curiosity about hacking, so he went
back to that forum that taught him how he was booted from World of Warcraft to see what other
kinds of hacks there were out there. This is where he learned about Google dorking. [MUSIC] Google
dorking is where you use Google as a vulnerability scanner. What I mean is Google is a search engine,
right? But in order for it to be a search engine, it needs to go out and scan and spider
its way across the entire internet, scooping up tons of data about websites along the way.
Google’s not specifically looking for vulnerabilities; it’s just grabbing
whatever’s out there and putting it into a database so that when you search Google,
it can present you with information about what you searched for. So,
you can search Google for specific things that are vulnerabilities in websites. Like for instance,
if you do a Google search for the term ‘ intitle:index.of id_rsa -id_rsa.pub’. This is
basically asking Google if they found any files on the internet called ID RSA, which typically
stores a private key. This file should never be out there on the internet and open for anyone
to see. It’s like exposing your password. Yet, Google has found tens of thousands of websites
that clearly display their private keys for anyone to see. These little clever searches were what
Daniel was learning and it opened his eyes to tons of possibilities. One day, he searched for
a misconfigured admin portal and found one, and was able to log into this website as an admin.
DANIEL: So, it was a website belonging to a school. I don’t want to name the name of the
website because it was over ten years ago, but what I ultimately did is defaced the website,
‘cause I just wanted to sort of – it was the first vulnerability that I ever found,
so I was sort of intrigued that I found something like that to begin with.
JACK: What did you put on the website?
DANIEL: It was some stupid picture. I think it was like – do you know the picture of the troll face?
JACK: Yeah.
DANIEL: Like, pretty much just left it there for a couple of days. But the thing is, back then,
I was really young. [MUSIC] I was like – I think I was twelve or thirteen. So,
it was more I was doing it for fun, if that makes sense.
JACK: This was amazing. This was legendary, at least to a thirteen-year-old. He got onto
a website and changed the picture to whatever he wanted. He felt clever and powerful.
DANIEL: You honestly sorta feel – it’s like a sensation of euphoria, if that makes sense,
almost like a really, really big achievement. But the problem is, after you’ve gained access
to that system, you start to look for the next thing. It’s always the next thing because you’re
always sort of chasing that feeling and trying to replicate what you just did.
JACK: So, he went back to Google, typing in search queries that would point him to
different websites that were vulnerable. Of course, when you type anything into Google,
it gives you 100,000 hits, right? So, he starts looking through the list of potential vulnerable
sites, and as he was scrolling through, looking at the websites on the list,
one stood out; microsoft.com. Well, it was a subdomain of Microsoft, but still;
this is a big company, so he followed the link to see if the site was vulnerable.
DANIEL: I found a cross-site scripting vulnerability in – on a subdomain in this
login panel. Essentially, it allowed me to inject JavaScript into that web page so I could craft,
for example, a malicious link and then steal user accounts, if that makes sense.
JACK: But a cross-site scripting vulnerability is hard to actually exploit. Finding it is one thing,
but using it to actually attack someone is a bit tricky. So, Daniel didn’t want to use it
to do any kind of malicious attack. Instead, he just decided to tell Microsoft about it.
DANIEL: So, back then, Microsoft ran a responsible disclosure program. I think
it was one of the few companies back then that did, and I basically took the proof
of concept and submitted it to Microsoft’s security team. Within a couple of hours,
they pretty – well, it was either a couple of hours or a couple of days. They got back
to me and triaged the vulnerability and basically confirmed the existence.
JACK: Did they give you anything, like a shirt?
DANIEL: No. So, all they pretty much – so, the only real incentive I had was when I found the
responsible disclosure program. They were offering a page which allowed you – where
they put people’s names on, where it was some type of security acknowledgement where you would
submit a vulnerability and they’d put your name on the website in returns – for submitting that
vulnerability. But back then, that type of thing was really cool to me because having your name
on a website like Microsoft when you’re so young seemed really fascinating. So, that’s basically
the only incentive that I used to submit the vulnerability, or the only source of motivation.
JACK: Yeah, so did they add your name to the thing?
DANIEL: Yeah. So, my name was added a week or two later and is – it remains there to this day.
JACK: Very good. So far, this is a great start for Daniel. Replacing
one image on a website? Not too bad, but now finding a vulnerability on
Microsoft’s website and reporting it to them? Nice job. On top of that,
he was given a great big thank-you. Even better. This could be a great start to a
prosperous career for Daniel. If he keeps it up, submits a few more vulnerabilities to companies,
he might start getting job offers, or he could be rewarded for responsibly disclosing bugs.
DANIEL: [MUSIC] Yeah, so, I pretty much started off with really positive intent. After that
initial submission with Microsoft, I basically applied the same – I started to wonder if other
companies would offer some recognition or the same – or some type of reward. So,
I went through loads of Fortune 500 companies, started finding vulnerabilities, and I ultimately
ended up submit – well, attempting to submit a lot of vulnerabilities to these Fortune 500
companies, but none of them ever really provided the same response as Microsoft,
because they didn’t run any official responsible disclosure programs.
JACK: Okay, so what did you do after telling them they’ve got a problem and they’re not fixing it?
DANIEL: So, I – the vulnerabilities started to accumulate. It got to a point where I was
just sitting on all of these vulnerabilities. I wasn’t really sure what to do with them. I just
had them saved somewhere. I kept doing it, kept accumulating vulnerabilities,
I kept trying to reach out to these companies, but they – most of the time, they wouldn’t
respond. So, two things would happen; either they’d respond and nothing would come of it,
or they would completely ignore your contact attempt. But I saw – I started to accumulate
all these vulnerabilities and I guess it got to a point where I decided that I was wasting my time.
JACK: [MUSIC] Now remember, Daniel learned these hacking techniques from a hacker forum,
and he was learning more and more from there. In fact, he was hanging out in chat rooms with them
and stuff. So, you can just imagine his eyes shifting and darting around between windows,
right? He’d look at one screen which showed all the vulnerabilities he found,
and then would check his e-mail to see if any of the companies replied that he
reported vulnerabilities to, and nothing. Then he looked at the hacker chatroom and
the forums he was on, and then his eyes does the loop again; vulnerabilities, empty inbox,
hacker forum. He knows the people on this hacker forum loved finding stuff like this.
DANIEL: Obviously, those individuals weren’t really – not all of them were
ethical. Not all of them were up to similar things that I was doing at that time. They
were up to malicious things. But I ultimately ended up sharing all of
the vulnerabilities with people that I had met on these forums. They sort
of started using these vulnerabilities with malicious intent, and I guess I joined them.
JACK: Now, keep in mind; at this point, Daniel has only found vulnerabilities. He
hadn’t actually tried to exploit any of them. It’s equivalent to finding a window open on
an office building at night, but not really looking in or reaching in to grab anything. So,
he tells the people on the forums hey, I found some vulnerabilities on some websites,
and of course, they loved seeing this. They went straight to trying to exploit
it to see what kind of information they could get out of these companies.
DANIEL: So, they’d exploit the vulnerabilities, they’d gain some type of access, and then – so,
they’d escalate privileges and they would just really pivot around the networks or whatever
they had gained access to. Sometimes it would result in data being stolen,
but mainly it was just keeping access at that point in time. It was just to see what could
really be done with the vulnerabilities, if that makes sense. I guess they were
just doing it to see what they could sort of accomplish. There was no real intent,
if that makes sense. It was more like, let’s fuck around and sort of see what we can do.
JACK: [MUSIC] Were you participating in this?
DANIEL: So, after I shared the vulnerabilities, I pretty much decided to participate in it, yeah.
JACK: I guess he’s already participating hacking these sites just by sharing vulnerabilities with
them. Doing recon, finding vulnerabilities, and sharing that is all part of the process,
right? I pause here for a moment because I’m trying to find the actual line that
you have to cross to become a criminal. Walking by a building just looking to
see if it has any open windows at night isn’t criminal behavior. But what if you
told a group of troublemakers about this way in you found? Is that now criminal,
just telling someone about a vulnerability you found with a company? It’s hard to say.
DANIEL: It depends where you are in the world. There’s different computer laws
pretty much in every different country. I can only speak on behalf of the UK. In the UK,
the Computer Misuse Act is so vague that there’s different interpretations of it. Like,
I read somewhere that the National Crime Agency has their own interpretation of the Computer
Misuse Act. So, I think it ultimately comes down to ethics. If you’re going to report a
vulnerability, [MUSIC] I think there’s a law – like, we heard that you’re really gonna be
prosecuted for trying to ethically disclose a vulnerability, but it doesn’t always turn
out that way. In that time period, I must have reported twenty or thirty vulnerabilities, and
I never received a negative response, not once. It was either no response or a positive response.
JACK: Well, now Daniel was switching it up. Instead of just finding vulnerabilities and
reporting them to companies, he was now actively trying to exploit these vulnerabilities and hack
into these companies and their websites, and trying to get into their systems and doing stuff
he absolutely wasn’t supposed to be doing. This was all just for fun. Occasionally, someone would
take some data or download something, but for the most part, it was just a big thrill to find a
way in and look around. That was enough for these guys. I’m picturing you as – half of you is there
to help. You’re like man, this stuff needs to be cleaned up. Nobody’s cleaning it up. Here you go;
you guys need to fix this stuff. Then half of you is like, I’m gonna have fun with what I have at
the same time and just screw around with – like, if these companies aren’t gonna be fixing stuff,
I might as well jump in and see what’s going on in there, and just take a look and get out.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think that’s pretty much accurate. I had no real – I wasn’t on one side,
if that makes sense. I was on both. Sometimes I’d sort of mess around with a vulnerability
and then sometimes I’d try and disclose it. I was never really – at that point in time,
I was never really on one side, if that makes sense.
JACK: Yeah. So, at that point you start going to college, I believe?
DANIEL: Yeah. So, around that time, I started going to college.
JACK: Daniel completed his Level 2 coursework, which is sort of like high school in the US,
and was wanting to go onto Level 3 courses, which is kind of like what you do after high
school. He finds a college near his parents’ house in Wales, in the UK,
and he signs up to study computers, which was his passion, clearly.
DANIEL: So, I complete this Level 2 course and then I apply for the Level 3 course. I
basically – I’m informed that this Level 3 course consists of a lot of presentations and socially,
you have to be – there’s a lot of activities in this course that involve – there’s a social
element to them and back then, I was a really unhappy and awkward, fat teenager.
I really didn’t like that at all. I basically had access to this botnet. It was essentially a Mirai
botnet which had loads – so, someone online essentially gave me access to this botnet.
JACK: Did you pay for it?
DANIEL: No. So, it was through someone I had met online and they gave me free access to it.
JACK: Now, what the Mirai botnet is best at is flooding an IP address with gobs of traffic,
so much that it will take down a website. It’s very good at doing DDoS attacks.
DANIEL: They pretty much had a website, and on that website there was a panel where everyone
would log in. That’s how everyone used to access all of their work and their documents. At the
time, I had access to this botnet and [MUSIC] I guess I got really bored and decided to point it
towards the college. I essentially DDossed that college, but what I didn’t know at the time is
that the college was also hosting a lot of other networks. It was basically one – so,
it was one huge network that hosted a lot of services like police stations and quite
a few things. So, by DDossing this network, I had pretty much affected a lot of services,
not just the college. I ended up DDossing a lot more things than I really intended to. But yeah,
by DDossing that website, in effect, nobody could log in and nobody could
really access their work or upload work or pretty much do their coursework.
JACK: Well, when the main portal that students used to log in to do their work was down,
this resulted in Daniel’s class getting canceled for the day, which was sort of what he wanted.
He didn’t want to go to class, but he also didn’t want to tell his parents that he didn’t
want to go to class. So, this was the perfect excuse for him of why he wasn’t going to class;
school was canceled because the computers were out of order. Once the scheduled time for his
class was over, he turned the attack off. [MUSIC] Well, that worked out in his favor for the day,
but then the next week rolls around and he has classes again. Since attacking the school with a
botnet resulted in class being canceled last time, he decided to launch the attack again. Again,
this took the computers down and it resulted in classes being canceled. This seemed to be
working. So, every time he had to go to class, he’d just attack the school.
DANIEL: So, at the very beginning, I used to pretty much just do it
in hour intervals. I would DDoS the network for an hour or two,
usually in the morning when everyone would go into the college, and quite quickly they’d find
out that the network was offline, and they’d cancel everything for that day.
JACK: Daniel had mixed feelings about all this. On one hand, he was relieved that he didn’t have
to do any presentations at school. But on the other hand, he felt bad for attacking
a school and ruining it for other students. But then his curiosity was growing, wondering
how many more days can the school be canceled because of this? Surely it can’t go on forever,
right? They’re not gonna cancel the whole semester, will they? It sort of made him
curious on how they’re gonna resolve this. How do you defend against a Mirai botnet?
How tough is the school to be able to stand up to it? So, he continued to attack the school.
DANIEL: I think in total, I must have done it well over thirty times. It became a constant
thing. I would pretty much do it every day. So, whenever the network would come back up,
I would just hit it again, and it became a constant thing. They used to send – they would
cancel lessons for weeks at a time because nobody could do anything, pretty much. So,
basically, one morning – so, I was sleeping and I remember opening my eyes [MUSIC] to two
police officers standing in my bedroom doorway. Obviously at this point, I was still living with
my parents because I was quite young. But I remember opening my eyes to these two police
officers standing in my bedroom doorway, and they sort of said to me you need to come downstairs. I
pretty much went downstairs; they – I sat down on a couch and they were going through everything.
They were going through my computer, they were taking all of the electronics,
pretty much all the devices in the house. At that time, I was cautioned and arrested
for DDossing the college, pretty much. So, when I – basically, when I was arrested,
even though they came to arrest me for the college DDoS, there was a lot of other material
on my hard drive that they wouldn’t have been aware of. They only became aware of it when
they inspected my devices. So, when I previously discussed where I was hacking websites for fun,
that was all still on my hard drive. So, what had happened is they had come to my house,
arrested me for DDossing the college. They kept me in a police station for
a couple of hours. They interviewed me. I was released on bail but during that bail period,
when they inspected my computers, they would have then found all the other material, which would
have allowed them to charge me with more things, like the – all the Computer Misuse charges.
JACK: Once the police discovered all this new evidence of crimes that Daniel committed,
they re-arrested him and charged him with thirteen more offenses. They brought him
down to the police station and interview him. They asked him lots of questions about the
stuff they found on his computers. They let him go home and they investigated some more,
and they brought him back to the station and interviewed him some more. This goes on and on for
months. They finally issue him a court date where the judge will decide what his punishment will be.
DANIEL: So, this is where it gets a bit tricky. So, basically when they issued me with that court
date – so, they issued me with a court date; I think it was the following year. During that time
period, after I had been released from the police station, I pretty much decided to re-offend,
and that’s where it starts to get a bit more complicated, because then…
JACK: Why do you say it like that? I decided to re-offend? Was it that clear in your head
that like, I’m gonna go re-offend? It just seems like a weird thing to say.
DANIEL: Honestly, no, it wasn’t really that clear.
JACK: He had about five months before he was due in court. Now, the cops still had
all his computers. They confiscated those months ago and kept them for evidence. So,
Daniel convinced his parents that he needed a computer in order to resume his life.
DANIEL: [MUSIC] By removing my devices, what they had done is sort of stripped my existence.
I was fulfilling all of my needs through the internet. I had no other activities.
I used to socialize through the internet, I used to have fun through the internet,
entertainment through the internet. Basically, I ended up committing more offenses on bail. I
can’t really explain why, but what happened – what ultimately happened is that I resumed everything
as if nothing had happened. I managed to convince my parents to buy me a new device. I went out,
logged in to all of these – I logged into the communities that I was already established in,
and I just continued. My criminality essentially – from that point onwards, my criminality
essentially escalated from low-level offending to blackmail, fraud, and computer hacking. There
was this three-month period where I basically went on this hacking spree, and I acted in a
group and I acted on my own. I sort of would hack into websites, I would steal the data,
and I would then try and blackmail the founder or the – whoever was behind the website for money.
JACK: Once he found his way back into the groups he was in and he got all his old
tools set up again, there was no stopping him. He went right back to his old ways,
because, as the old saying goes…
MUSIC: [MUSIC/LYRICS] In for a penny, in for a pound, you should never jump
off the merry-go-round. In for a penny, in for a pound…[CON’T]
JACK: Now, there was no effort to do responsible disclosure. His intention was just to figure out
how to make money with all the hacking he was doing. The easiest thing that came to mind was
extortion. I hacked you; pay me or else, kinda stuff. He didn’t have his hands on
any kind of ransomware, or he might have tried to use that. But what he would do was find a website
with vulnerabilities, exploit them, maybe take some data from them, and then e-mail the owner
of the site demanding money, or else he’ll publish this data that he stole and publish
the vulnerabilities on how he got in. Sometimes he didn’t even exploit the site and steal data;
sometimes he’d just tell them that he found a severe vulnerability on their site and will
publish it unless they pay him. What Daniel was asking was anywhere between five and
forty Bitcoin. A Bitcoin then was only worth about $200, so he was demanding anywhere from
$1,000 to $10,000. Of course, companies weren’t paying, so sometimes he’d escalate the situation
and would get personal data from site employees and show them how he was going to publish their
information unless he pay them. These were some serious threats to these companies,
so of course, they were reporting all this to the authorities. But Daniel was hitting companies
in countries all over the world; Canada, the US, Australia. Did any of these work?
DANIEL: So, one of the blackmails worked, and I pretty much ended up extracting about £5,000
out of an Australian company. [MUSIC] We basically sent an e-mail to this – the
CEO of this company and we said if you don’t pay, we’re going to release all the customer
data and we’re also going to publish the source code, which would then make their
product a bit useless. After we sent that e-mail, that’s when they decided to pay.
JACK: Now, here’s why you shouldn’t pay people when they try to extort you like this. As soon
as this company paid Daniel, he just wrote back to them and demanded even more money, saying I found
even more stuff; pay me more. You can’t trust criminals to be honorable in this situation.
DANIEL: So, along with blackmail, I was putting some of the data that I had stolen up for
sale. I was trying to sell them on various forums and tried to make money that way. So,
I made a couple of hundred of pounds, but I never really made a lot of money.
JACK: Now, getting even this little bit of money, it was like jet fuel for Daniel. It
was amazing that his system worked, and he was getting paid for hacking. He just
had to hack more and extort more, and he’d get paid more. So, he kept on the hunt for
more vulnerabilities and was going crazy with all kinds of hacking and extortion attempts.
DANIEL: The companies became a lot bigger, the websites became a lot bigger,
and the blackmail – the sums demanded with the blackmail became a lot bigger as well.
Eventually, one of the companies that we – well, that I sort of hit was TalkTalk.
JACK: Oh, TalkTalk. This is a British telecom company. They provide cell phone and internet
services. It’s a big company in the UK. But this TalkTalk incident was quite the thing. [MUSIC] It
all started one evening when Daniel logged into the hacking forum that he frequented. In fact,
he was such a regular at this hacking forum that he was a moderator there.
DANIEL: On one evening, a user makes a post and he basically – he’s asking for
assistance in exploiting this vulnerability in TalkTalk. What he’s effectively found is
an SQL injection on a subdomain but he doesn’t know how to exploit it,
so he sort of posted it on this forum asking for help. That’s when I’ve come across it.
JACK: This user posted a vulnerability for a pretty big telecom company and had
no idea how severe this was. Some savvy users on the site pretty quickly were
able to exploit this vulnerability and actually get into TalkTalk’s
network and start moving around and stealing data. Daniel was seeing the
frenzy that was stirring from this forum post. This was really bad for TalkTalk.
DANIEL: This thread got posted and loads of people started sharing it. It went everywhere. It went
over other forums, it went over Java, it went over IRC. I think at that time,
there must have been well over twenty people that had this vulnerability in their possession,
for sure. There were just so many people exploiting this vulnerability. So much
data was stolen from TalkTalk that it was really unbelievable. Even people – so,
people on darknet markets even started selling the data. It was pretty much everywhere. So,
I took the vulnerability and I initially shared it with someone on IRC. They had pretty much decided
to dump as much data as possible. There was something like sixty-four databases,
and they’d stolen – I think it was 100,000 records before the website went offline
and they couldn’t dump any more data. That person then sent me that data on the server.
JACK: The next day, this was all over the news. Here’s a clip from the BBC.
HOST: Some breaking news; in the last hour, police are investigating after a significant
and sustained cyber-attack on the website of the company TalkTalk. We actually have
the CEO of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, here. First of all, Dido Harding, how many people are affected?
DIDO: We don’t know for certain, but we’re taking
the precaution tonight of contacting all four million of our customers.
HOST: But you didn’t do – the attack was yesterday.
DIDO: The attack started yesterday. We brought down all of our websites
yesterday lunchtime. We spent the last twenty-four hours with the Metropolitan
Police and various security experts trying to get to the bottom of what has happened.
JACK: Good luck trying to get to the bottom of this one. Twenty different people just breached
your network. But not Daniel; Daniel has only seen the forum post and told a friend to check
this out. His friend is the one who got in and downloaded the database. But at this
point in Daniel’s life, he was actively extorting companies left and right. So,
he looked at the data that his friend took from TalkTalk and got an idea.
DANIEL: [MUSIC] So, I had access to this data and I basically decided to
gather all of the e-mails from the data and – so, the staff e-mails,
the employee e-mails, and the CEO’s e-mail addresses, and I decided to send a ransom
demand basically demanding Bitcoin in exchange for me not to release this data.
JACK: The CEO of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, did in fact get his e-mail,
and I know this because here’s another clip from the BBC a few days later.
DIDO: It’s a live criminal investigation. All I can say
is that I had and personally received a contact from someone purporting,
as I say – I don’t know whether they are or are not – to be the hacker looking for money.
JACK: The CEO didn’t reply to Daniel. Instead, she just turned over his e-mail
to the Metropolitan Police who got right to work investigating this case. I’ve heard from
a few listeners that they don’t like it when I have teenage hackers on this show. But let
me tell you why I think this is important. This isn’t some cringe roll-your-eyes kind of story;
ah yeah, a teenager hacked some company. Big whoop. This guy isn’t even that good
of a hacker. Anyone could have done this. Maybe, but this whole TalkTalk incident resulted in $70
million in damage to TalkTalk. They saw scores of customers cancel their service because of
this. Their stock tumbled, and the CEO had to appear before parliament to give testimony as
to why their security failed. This was a huge problem for TalkTalk, which meant it was a huge
problem for the highly-skilled, talented IT staff that worked to secure TalkTalk.
DIDO: We would receive what’s called
denial-of-service attacks on our network every week.
JACK: This is their adversary, a teenager who wants to make some money from your one slip-up
that you had on a server that came over when TalkTalk acquired another company. What I’m
saying is this is really important and you can’t ignore this kind of adversary. You can’t roll your
eyes and ignore this kind of attack, because this kind of attack can destroy your company and bring
it to its knees. This TalkTalk incident is such a big story that I actually spent a whole episode
on it. That was Episode 4, so if you want to know all the details of what went down in the TalkTalk
incident, go check out Episode 4. Anyway, as the hack died down in the news, a few weeks go by.
DANIEL: One evening in November, I was driving and I had a phone call from my dad. On the phone,
all I can hear in the background is someone saying my name and then
saying not to tell me something. [MUSIC] But my dad had basically
told me that there was police waiting in my house and they wanted to speak to me. So,
I initially – a part of me sort of knew what it was about at that point. I wasn’t that naive. I
sort of knew what it was about, so I pretty much turned the car around and drove home.
JACK: When you turned that car around and you were driving home,
what was going on in your head as you were driving home?
DANIEL: I was…
JACK: Like, were you – I can’t imagine you listening to your
favorite music and just jamming – dancing around.
DANIEL: No, definitely not, no. I honestly got lost in my own world. On the way home,
I just had so many thoughts going through my head that I really didn’t know what to
think. A part of me really didn’t want it to be real, even though I knew – obviously then,
I pretty much knew what it was, because there was no other reason for them to
come back. A part of me was just like, wishing that it wasn’t real and that it
was all not reality. It’s really hard to explain. I was just lost in my own world.
There were no – there wasn’t panic. I guess I was just focused on getting back to my house.
JACK: He arrives home. Now, keep in mind, he lives in a small, quiet town out in Wales.
DANIEL: There’s like, four police vans, twenty police officers, there’s multiple agencies,
there’s undercover police officers. You could tell it was a lot more serious this time. The whole
street was closed and it literally looked like a murder scene. I parked my car, I walked past
the police officers because they didn’t recognize me. I walked into the house, and then my parents
told me that this was me. A part of me thinks that they were expecting something a lot more serious,
because at first they didn’t even recognize me. There were agencies from – so, there was the
National Crime Agency, there was the Metropolitan Police, there was my local cyber-crime unit.
JACK: They go through the house, seizing all his computer equipment just like before.
DANIEL: So, they put me in the back of a undercover police van. They put me in
between two police officers, and they pretty much escorted us through town.
They had their blue lights on. There was one car in front of us, one car behind us,
and we pretty much just flew through my town center. They closed off roundabouts,
they closed off roads, and we must have literally got to the police station in minutes.
JACK: Now, at this point, he’s around seventeen years old. They interviewed him and asked him
what happened. Then they let him go back home so they can investigate further. [MUSIC] They
bring him back to the police station and charge him with twenty offenses. They were charging
him with attempting to extort Dido Harding, and they apparently found some of the other offenses
he did on the other companies too, which gave Daniel a clue on how they found him.
DANIEL: So, when I sent the extortion e-mail to TalkTalk, I used Tor. I used an anonymous
e-mail provider. But around that time, I was obviously still blackmailing other
companies. What I had done is I had hacked and blackmailed another company without using Tor;
I only used a VPN. What I had done is I had reused a Bitcoin address for the TalkTalk extortion and
the other companies’ extortion, so they had pretty much managed to use a Bitcoin address
to link those two offenses together, and then they had investigated the smaller hack. Because
I was only using a VPN, presumably the VPN provider turned over my IP address.
JACK: This case was bigger than what the local police station of Wales could handle,
so they took him to the Metropolitan Police in London, about four hours away. About two
months after being arrested, he finally gets to go to the magistrate court in London.
DANIEL: I go to my first court hearing. In effect,
I’m then remanded into custody from that magistrates’ court.
JACK: Which means he had to go to jail, but only for a week or two.
But this was his first time in jail, and he did not like the experience.
DANIEL: After those seven to ten days, I pretty much decided that I wasn’t built for prison,
and it was honestly one of the worst weeks of my life. I was pretty much a cyber criminal. I was
there on computer hacking charges and blackmail. Then to be put in a cell with someone that was
doing five years for armed robbery is really – it’s a huge shock to the system ‘cause you
honestly don’t expect to be sharing a cell with someone – like, that’s really serious
offending. So, I pretty much decided from that point on that I was never gonna re-offend again.
I think that’s when it really hit me, that – just those seven to ten days, I decided you know what,
I’m never gonna re-offend again. It’s not worth anything to go through that experience again.
JACK: Now, this week he spent in jail was not his whole punishment. I’m confused on how things go in
the UK, but my theory is since he had previous charges for hacking the school and he did all
this extortion stuff while he was out on bail, the court didn’t want him to break more laws,
so they threw him in jail just to give him a taste of what prison life is like,
and this worked. This shock to his system made Daniel not want to re-offend again, because if
this was gonna be his consequences, he did not want to make it any worse. [MUSIC] So, he gets
out on bail and has to wait for his court date where they’re going to figure out what his full
sentence is gonna be. Now, when he’s out on bail, the judge put a lot of restrictions on Daniel.
DANIEL: A lot of them were really bizarre. I was banned from Python, the programming language,
I had to register all of my devices with my local police, I was banned from using Tor,
I was banned from using VPNs. I was pretty much banned from a lot of technology. Like, I couldn’t
delete my internet history. But the only one that really stands out is being banned from Python.
I couldn’t really understand why they decided to put that as part of my bail conditions. But yeah,
I had all of these bail conditions on me and that’s pretty much what I had to live by for like,
months. After spending that week in prison, I sort of had an epiphany and realized that no matter
what happens in my life, I never want to be in this place again. So when I was released on – when
I was bailed from prison, a part of me didn’t even want to touch computers again. I would have found
it a lot easier just to not use computers ever again if it meant not going through that week.
But as weeks went by, I sort of – I guess I got bored and I ended up buying another computer.
JACK: He eventually got back into hacking, looking for vulnerabilities on websites. But this time,
it was completely different. He was serious that he was done offending and was abiding by
his bail conditions, because what he wanted to do was use his hacking skills for good,
and he started doing responsible vulnerability disclosures for companies,
finding problems and then quietly reporting it to them, not exploiting any of it,
not stealing anything, and not extorting anyone. He wasn’t even asking for a reward; he was simply
trying to make right all the wrongs he did by helping companies secure their systems better.
DANIEL: I started engaging in all of these bug bounty programs. I started engaging in responsible
disclosure. [MUSIC] Pretty much every day, I was reporting vulnerabilities in all types of systems
while on bail. So, in my head at the time, I sort of realized that any good that I could do would
be considered during my sentencing hearing. So, it’s basically called mitigation. So, you can do
a lot of good things and then your lawyers can go to the judge and go look, these are all the
good things about this defendant and this is why you should give him less of a prison sentence or
no prison sentence at all. So, I pretty much decided to engage in responsible disclosure,
report all of these vulnerabilities to these entities, and pretty much every day for two years.
JACK: He was finding a lot of stuff and reporting
it. One place he liked reporting bugs to was MITRE’s CVE program.
DANIEL: What I would do is I would take an open-source project,
I would find a vulnerability, I would then contact the vendor, I’d inform the vendor,
and after they’ve patched the vulnerability, the vendor – I’d then ask the vendor for permission
to sort of file this proof-of-concept along with a publication to this awarding body called Citra,
and they would then publicly issue a CVE ID for this project affected.
JACK: Nice; he’s responsible for finding many CVEs. That’s pretty good. CVEs are like a list
of known vulnerabilities in products. When the vulnerability you found is big enough
to merit its own CVE, it means that it’s now going to be integrated into antivirus tools,
vulnerability scanners, and more security tools to detect when someone else is
exploiting this application. So, not only was he privately helping vendors fix bugs,
but he was also helping the professional security community be able to identify those
bugs if anyone were to do what he did. Did you get paid for any of these bugs that you found?
DANIEL: So, I was doing this with no real financial intent. I was just doing this for the
sole – on the sole principle of it contributing to less of a prison sentence. But sometimes,
a lot of companies would offer me money regardless, and what I would do is I’d
accept the financial rewards and I just sort of accumulated the money. The money
then went to re-encompensating my – the victims of my offending.
JACK: Over the course of this time, while he was waiting for his sentencing court date,
he found vulnerabilities in lots of companies. I mean lots. He always simply asked for a thank-you
letter or a letter of recommendation from helping someone. This was the most valuable reward he
wanted, and he got a lot of letters. He sent them to me to see, too. The PDF he gave me is
over 300 pages long of just really nice things companies have said about Daniel. For instance,
here, let me read one. Dear Dan, Deutsche Bank appreciates your ongoing efforts in searching
and responsibly communicating IT security vulnerabilities. You showed us a cross-site
scripting vulnerability we had on our website, and we thank you for your dedication to the task
of increasing internet security and wish you all the best for your future endeavors. Signed,
the CISO of Deutsche Bank. The list of companies that he found vulnerabilities
in and reported them and got thank-you letters for is really long. [MUSIC] Here,
I’ll have Daniel tell you a bunch of places that sent him thank-you letters.
DANIEL: The Crown Court Digital Case System, the National Crime Agency, the Ministry of Justice,
the parliament website, University of Cambridge, the Australian National University,
Stanford University, Yahoo, GCHQ, Royal Air Force, DBS Bank, AT&T, S3, BBC, Sony, Deutsche Telekom,
United Nations, Duke University, Adobe, AOL, Telegram, Sage, Amazon. Tell me when to stop.
JACK: Well, I’m… [LAUGHING]
DANIEL: There’s thousands.
JACK: At first I was like oh, this guy’s just getting universities and schools; that’s easy.
But then I heard GCHQ and I was like wait, and then it just keeps going. So, how – what was…
DANIEL: No, there’s some real – even though the bulk of them are cross-site scripting
vulnerabilities, there are some really serious vulnerabilities that are aborted.
JACK: Okay, so…
DANIEL: I think…
JACK: So, these ones that you listed,
this is – they confirmed okay, thank you, and sent you a letter of thanks?
DANIEL: So, these – yeah, I’ve had actual letters from the directors and CEOs of these entities
where they’ve said – they’ve acknowledged the vulnerability and they’ve said thanks.
JACK: The GCHQ, that comes as a surprise as you were listing things. What happened there?
DANIEL: So, GCHQ basically published this open-source project called CyberChef.
JACK: Yep, I’ve used it.
DANIEL: When they – yeah, when they first published it,
there was a git based XSS in it, pretty much.
JACK: Okay, so this was just a vulnerability and one of the open-source tools that GCHQ
puts out. It wasn’t a vulnerability into their main database or something. But still,
it’s pretty cool to have a letter of appreciation from GCHQ, isn’t it? One day while doing all this,
Daniel came across another vulnerability that someone found on TalkTalk’s site. Daniel
confirmed the vulnerability was still valid and immediately reached out to someone. But this time,
instead of telling a friend about it, he reported this to the authorities and shortly after that,
it got fixed. So, in a way, he even helped TalkTalk become more secure.
Daniel had truly changed his ways and was on a serious dedicated mission to
help as many companies as possible. He even did some math to try to quantify it all.
DANIEL: [MUSIC] The total amount of my offending was probably – like, TalkTalk
alone was $79 million. If you combine everything else, it probably was closer to $100 million.
But when you really look at all the companies that I’ve disclosed vulnerabilities in – like,
there’s 5,000 – there’s over 5,000 companies. Then you take some of the submissions which are like,
P1 vulnerabilities and ISPs and banks. You can only logically assume that I’ve probably saved
more money for those companies than the damage that I caused, because for – I had a vulnerability
on – I had a RCE on Virgin Media, and that was a more critical vulnerability than the vulnerability
that I discovered on TalkTalk. If that had been exploited, then presumably it would have had the
same effect as it had on TalkTalk. So, I think it’s really fair to say that after submitting all
these vulnerabilities, over 5,000 vulnerabilities, I honestly can confidently say that I’ve probably
saved a lot more money for companies than my offending ever caused in terms of damage.
Because there were so many charges and my case was so complicated, I was going to court and they
must have told me five or six times that the next time I would come to court, I would be sentenced.
Except, every time that I would go to court, I would never be sentenced and there would be some
legal dispute about a charge or something. So, I sort of had to live the experience of thinking
that I was gonna be sentenced five to six times. When that kept happening, it really started to
play on my mental health. I got really depressed, basically, because it was a really stressful
situation to be in. My lawyers were telling me okay, you’re gonna get twelve and a half years,
you’re gonna get five years. A part of me just wanted it to stop completely, so I would pretty
much just go home and I would honestly do nothing. I would spend months – I would spend pretty
much all day just in bed waiting for my next sentencing hearing. It was like being locked – it
was essentially like being in limbo. I would just wait for the next date to the next date,
and that’s pretty much how I lived the last two years on bail. My entire life just resolved around
these dates that were being set. Eventually, it got to a point where I was so depressed that I
lost over seven stone in weight and I became emaciated. I used to be really overweight. I
pretty much lost half of my body weight, and I started to get really depressed. I stopped eating
and eventually my legal team took notice and they started to refer me to doctors and psychiatrists.
JACK: He pleaded guilty to ten or eleven of these charges brought against him,
but they were trying to charge him with things he didn’t actually do, and this caused some disputes.
DANIEL: At this point, there was a huge dispute between a lot of psychiatrists and doctors saying
whether I was even fit to go to trial, because I was – I intended on pleading not guilty to
these new allegations, because I’m actually innocent. I didn’t actually commit them. There
were days that I’d even wake up and I wouldn’t be able to remember my own name. So, after this
huge dispute of seeing loads of psychiatrists and doctors, they essentially deemed me not fit
to go to trial. So, the prosecution essentially wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money for no reason.
JACK: So, with him not able to stand trial to dispute the charges against him,
the court had no choice but to simply charge him with whatever they thought
he was guilty of and sentence him. His sentencing date kept getting pushed back,
but eventually came after four years of waiting. It really was four years?
DANIEL: Yeah. So, I was – my – I was arrested for the TalkTalk hack in 2015,
November, and then I was sentenced in 2019 in June.
JACK: By this point, he was twenty-one years old.
DANIEL: Sentencing comes and essentially, it comes down to whether I’m gonna go to a hospital
or prison. What the judge had essentially did is gotten the head of the healthcare unit in
HMP Belmarsh to take responsibility for me. She was at my sentencing hearing and when I
was being sentenced, the judge put my – so, he read out twelve-and-a-half years.
JACK: Twelve-and-a-half years in prison is what the judge said was his punishment. Oof. Fourteen
years is the maximum for extortion crimes, so it couldn’t really get much worse for him. But this
was only the starting point. Quickly, Daniel’s lawyer jumps up and says to the judge that
Daniel has had excellent behavior while on bail and has not re-offended. [MUSIC] This made the
judge happy and reduced the sentence a little. Then Daniel pulled out hundreds of positive
letters he received from helping all those companies improve their security, and the judge
was particularly impressed by this and lowered the sentence some more. His lawyer kept coming
up with other reasons on why Daniel deserves a lower sentence, and the judge kept lowering it.
DANIEL: He read out twelve-and-a-half years and then he went ten years,
nine years, seven years. It essentially got to four years.
JACK: Four years prison time was his final sentence that he received for
this criminal behavior. Now, in the UK, you only serve half your time in prison
and the other half out in the community, sort of like parole in the US. When it
was at the end there and they said four years, what was going through your mind?
DANIEL: Honestly, at that time, I was just in a – I was in a state of shock because I
couldn’t actually get over the fact that he’d read out twelve years to begin with. Once I
heard that figure, I really – I sorta just went numb and my mind just sorta went blank.
It was almost like an out-of-body experience. I couldn’t actually believe that he had read
out twelve years. It was only really after I’d been taken down under the courts that I
really started to consider the possibility of doing two – well, four years in prison.
JACK: They immediately whisk him off to prison directly from court, but first he had to get some
healthcare to get his mental state back to normal. But once he was showing signs of stability,
they put him in the main cell block with the other prisoners. But just when he got used
to the routine, they put him on a bus and moved him to another prison, a super-max prison, even.
Of course, when you go to a new prison, all the other prisoners want to know what you did to get
there. He tells them the truth and says hey, look up my name if you don’t believe me. So, they did.
DANIEL: A lot of them actually thought that I stole £70 million from TalkTalk. They didn’t
realize that I – that was the damage cost. Anyway, I have loads of gang members asking
me to hack their phones. They’re asking me to hack the county, hack the prison.
JACK: He got on pretty well with the other prisoners. They liked him since he didn’t
pose as any threat to them, and they thought he was smart with computers. [MUSIC] But the
prison guards and staff did not like him. They were afraid of what he might do if he used
any of the computers in prison. They must have gotten word from someone else too, because they
just didn’t treat him well. For instance, they randomly searched his prison cell frequently,
much more frequently than any of the other prisoners when he was there. He knew something was
off because he just couldn’t figure out why he was being treated differently. One morning at 5:00 AM,
he gets woken up by some guards telling him get out, we’re searching your cell. Of course,
he gets out and looks around and sees there are some other cells being raided,
but they’re all people he knew in prison. Out of all the prisoners,
why is it him and just the people he knows that are getting raided? It didn’t make sense.
DANIEL: When they raid your cell, they just rip everything apart. They tip the bed apart,
they – I was even – so, I go back to my cell and I was even told that they were using screwdrivers
and stuff to take furniture apart to see if I was hiding anything. I get back to my cell,
I clean everything up, and funnily enough, there was a razor that I didn’t even know
that was in the cell from the previous occupant and they just put it on the table and left it
there almost to send a message to say look, we found something. But I really didn’t even
know it was in the cell, so there we go. So, what that essentially did was make me become
even closer friends with these – they just – they were all part of a gang, in effect,
so I become close friends with these people. Two days later, my cell opens again, 7:00 AM,
and they say right, you’re being drug test. Come with us. I don’t take drugs, okay? Drug tested;
come with us. So, I go for some drug test. On the piece of paper that they give me, it says
it’s randomly allocated, except it’s not randomly allocated because you can see the coincidence,
right? But that’s how they were abusing the system. They were saying it was just randomly
allocated. It’s a load of bullshit. They were just trying to cause me inconvenience, I think,
or they had some source of intelligence; someone probably said something.
I didn’t take drugs, but that’s how intelligence works. So, I – negative on the drug test. Then
Christmas Eve comes. [MUSIC] So, Christmas Eve morning, my cell opens at 6:00 AM and
they tell me – two prison officers tell me you’re being transferred. I said,
okay. At first I was like okay, maybe this isn’t a bad thing. Where to? They say HMP Bristol. Now,
HMP Bristol is a really bad prison, okay? It’s a Victorian old prison. It’s in England and it’s not
really a prison anyone wants to go to, especially over Christmas. It was their way of ruining my
Christmas and throwing me out of that prison as fast as they could. But anyway, after they tell me
I’m being transferred to HMP Bristol, everyone’s out of their cells and these gang members figure
out what’s going on, and they convince me that it’s really – I sort of – I was 50/50;
a part of me – I didn’t want to go to Bristol, but I knew I didn’t have a choice, because I couldn’t
just stay in Berwyn because they’d now remove – like, they removed that option. If I stayed there,
they would have just took me to segregation or something. So, one of these gang members
essentially convinces me to put a – so, take a safety razor and put it in my mouth, okay?
What essentially that does is it invokes a safer custody issue, ‘cause that essentially
means that – it’s like self-harm. The prison officers can’t touch you. I put a – so,
I – this guy – this is completely out of character, by the way. I’m not some
irrational person that goes around self-harming, and I’m not saying that self-harm is irrational;
I’m just saying I’m not the type of person to do that. I don’t put razors in my mouth
and all of this type of thing. It was only when that suggestion was made to me that I did it,
so I put a safety razor in my mouth ‘cause these gang members had convinced me to do it,
and I’m sorta – I just – I put it in my mouth and I looked at the prison officer,
and I said I’m not moving. Anyway, everyone’s locked up. Well, they tried to lock everyone up,
and – ‘cause – because this is taking place in my cell, and all the prisoners essentially refuse,
because there’s a huge crowd outside my cell and they’ve worked out what’s going on. Because
I was on good terms with these prisoners, they thought it was really unfair. It was my first
time in prison, I was in for computer hacking, and it was really unfair to transfer me to a
prison like HMP Bristol on Christmas Eve. So, they refused. Prisoners start smashing the wing up.
They started smashing the kiosk and in effect, a really small riot starts. Someone threw a
fridge off the top landing and all the prison officers left the wing. I was oblivious to this
at this time because I was in my cell, but I – so later on – so, when this is happening,
all the prison officers leave their cell – leave the wing, sorry, and everything goes
quiet. All the prisoners are just there rioting, I’m sitting my cell, I’ve got a razor in my mouth,
and we’re just sort of sitting, yeah. So, I go by the door frame and forty-five seconds later,
less than a minute, about eight prison officers wearing riot gear come marching onto the wing. I
can see them coming onto the wing. They’ve got riot shields, they’ve got batons,
and they’re all kitted up. They’re walking towards me. I sort of realize that if I didn’t
drop this razor and comply in the next thirty seconds, they were gonna force me to comply. So,
I spat the razor out and I said look, I’m going. Take me to where you want to go.
JACK: They transferred him to another prison and he spent a few months there.
It was much worse than the other two he was in,
but he gets through it and finishes his prison sentence. So, you spent how long in prison?
DANIEL: So, I did two years in prison.
JACK: When did you get out?
DANIEL: June last year.
JACK: Since getting out of prison, he still has to do two years of probation and he has to follow all
the rules set forth on him. He can use a computer and the internet, but he has restrictions,
and he hopes to someday get a regular above-board job doing cyber security. So, last question.
DANIEL: Yeah.
JACK: What’s your biggest regret?
DANIEL: Probably blackmailing people.
JACK: Why?
DANIEL: I don’t really – so, I don’t regret the hacking aspect of what I did.
I just think that my offending became really twisted when I started blackmailing people,
because that’s where it became really personal. I think that’s ultimately what sent me to prison. I
think just hacking systems is completely different in comparison to blackmail.
(OUTRO): [OUTRO MUSIC] Thanks to Daniel Kelley for sharing this story with us.
This show is made by me, your friendly moderator, Jack Rhysider. Sound design was
done by the too-weird Andrew Meriwether, and our theme music is by the mysterious
Breakmaster Cylinder. Oh, and hey, if you ever have questions about TCPIP,
I know the pro to call. Get it? Protocol? Forget it. This is Darknet Diaries.