JACK: Computers aren’t always right. They make mistakes, encounter errors, and crash. Sometimes
the errors can be frustrating especially when the computer is at a big company and it makes
a billing error that says you owe them $1,000. When that corporation won’t admit it’s their
mistake and insists you pay for the bill that you didn’t create, this can be infuriating. But
what can you do when you try to fight it but the corporation refuses to admit it’s their problem?
Well, some hackers know exactly what to do. JACK (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC]
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.
I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: Hey. MOBMAN: Yo, what up?
JACK: You want to tell us your name? MOBMAN: Everybody calls me Mobman.
JACK: Hacking changed Mobman’s life but to understand how it changed his life,
we need to go back to when he was just a kid.
MOBMAN: Alright so I started off, I’m a little kid. I’m like, eight,
nine years old. Got a Nintendo, you know, the old NES square box, blow in the cartridge, push it in
a few times. I was addicted to video games, like nonstop. I’d sneak out in the middle of the night
and go play it while my mom is asleep. JACK: His mom would catch him doing this
and take his Nintendo away. Little Mobman was addicted, so…
MOBMAN: I’ll go find it and then skip school just to play the video games. Very sneaky kid.
I was like, the devil. Eventually she took a hammer and smashed the shit out of the Nintendo.
That was my first computer, so I got to see the insides, look at it,
take it all apart, try to figure out how to get it back to working and stuff. That did not happen.
It did not get fixed but I learned a little bit about it. The next thing was I got a computer.
[MUSIC] I started playing a game called Ultima Online.
It’s a massive multiplayer roleplaying game. A lot of people now, they would be able to relate to it
as like World of Warcraft. Ultimate Online, if you die they can take all your stuff and
pretty much leave you naked and bare. JACK: As you might have guessed Mobman became
addicted to Ultima Online. As a teenager he found himself playing it every chance he could.
MOBMAN: The computer breaks. Mom’s like, I ain’t paying somebody to fix it ‘cause
you broke it like, three or four other times. I had to learn how to fix all that stuff and how
the actual operating system works. JACK: He gets it working again and starts
taking an interest in computers and learned how to do a little programming and troubleshoot
problems on the computer. But still he’d find himself playing Ultima Online all the time
and back then to be online, you needed a phone and modem to connect to the internet
so he’d often hear his mom shouting… MOBMAN: Phone’s busy. I know you’re on that
damn game. Blah, blah, blah. She’ll go and disconnect the phone so I’ll go outside. I
found the little phone box thing and I’ll splice the cables of the neighbors and run them into ours
so then I could use their telephone. JACK: After years of playing Ultima Online
and using his computer every day for hours a day, he started to become pretty good at computers. He
started visiting some of the more popular online bulletin boards and chat rooms and learning how
to do different hacks like making free phone calls and stuff. He started learning that
software has exploits so what does he do? MOBMAN: In Ultima Online – so me and my buddies,
we’ll sit out there and we’ll figure out ways to exploit the game. We’ll hide out in front
of people’s houses, stealth our way, which you basically turn invisible. We’ll wait outside
somebody’s house, their door. When they opened it, then we’ll just walk inside their door,
invisible, and wait for them to leave [00:05:00] and then steal all their shit. We built our own
scams. Like, we’ll pull up the trading window to trade somebody for stuff and then we’ll close it.
Their stuff will be too heavy and it’ll fall and drop on the ground or they can’t move
and we’ll just kill them and then take it. Eventually we bought a boat in the game. You could
have a boat; you could sail around and do shit. There was a little cargo bay in front of the boat
and you could store your shit in it. It works like a house; you have to have a key or whatever,
you can open and close the – lock it so you can’t get in. But we learned if you park a boat
at the bow in front of another bow of another boat and you’re standing out in your boat,
apparently your privileges of your boat links over to their boat and you could like, open their cargo
and take all their shit. We spent a couple weeks just going and hitting every boat on the whole
damn server and stealing everybody’s stuff. JACK: Players could open tickets and complain on
the forums but Mobman and his pirating friends never got caught doing this. They made a lot of
in-game money stealing from all these players and he wanted to show off his epic loot so he
made a website showcasing what he had. MOBMAN: We’d take snippets of the game and
that’s how I started learning action script and Flash. I’d put some music behind it and
release them all up online on our GeoCities websites. Then we used to hack each other’s
websites and take them down and stuff. JACK: In the 90s when you played Ultima Online,
it asks if you want to save your login so you don’t have to type it in next time. If you do
this it actually saves your username and password in a clear text file called uo.cfg.
MOBMAN: We figured that out and we’re like oh cool, so if we get other people’s uo.config file,
‘cause there’s some idiots at school that play it, we could log in as them.
JACK: Now we have all the ingredients for a fresh-baked hack. Mobman is now one part computer
tech, two parts griefer, one part programmer, and a dash of greediness. His mission is to
somehow take that uo.cfg file from other players online. He mixed all this together and created a
pretty clever program. MOBMAN: It’s a remote-access
tool. It was a Trojan horse virus. JACK: He built a program that would allow
him to take control of another computer. MOBMAN: You could open and close a CD ROM. You
could flip the screen. You could hide the start button. You could move the mouse on their screen,
click around, you could open up their C-drive, change their wallpaper. There
was a whole bunch of other stuff. JACK: He also connected it to ICQ,
a common messaging app back then. MOBMAN: When they get infected with it,
it’ll send you an ICQ message and it’ll tell you their IP address
and that they’re online. JACK: Mobman called his virus
Sub7. Now that he spent some time creating it, it was time to put it to work.
MOBMAN: In Ultima Online we’ll stand by a bank. We’ll go buy their – oh, man, we got – ‘cause we
were rich in the game. We had castles and millions of gold and all of our characters were badass
because of our thievery and stealing everybody’s stuff from the boats and the other things and
killing everybody and stuff. People were like, how did you get all that stuff? We were like oh,
no, we made this little program and it gives you unlimited gold. We’re like hey, do you want it?
They were like yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re like cool, what’s your ICQ? We’ll send it over to you.
So we’ll message them and then we’ll send them the EXE and then we’ll put up an error code.
File Not Found, Error, OK Cancel, or whatever and then we’ll send them the thing. They’ll run it
and they’ll be like oh, it didn’t work. It gave me some error. Then they’ll run it again,
infecting themselves again, and then run it again and then they infected themselves like,
three or four – people infect themselves like, ten times before they figure out oh,
I guess it just doesn’t work. I’m like oh, man, I must have missed a file, I forgot to send it
to you, then you give up or whatever. Then they go off on their own merry, merry way.
Then you remove them off of ICQ and be like oh, sorry, I guess the hack didn’t work.
JACK: Once that player is infected Mobman would swoop in and grab the uo.cfg file which contained
the username and password of that player. MOBMAN: You’re looking for other cheater – people
that want to cheat in the game. You tell them that you have the cheat for them.
I think that still goes on to this day. You see Minecraft and all those other
stupid – YouTube videos out there are like oh, we got this hack; you get free gold. Or
wall hacks and shit. All those are infected with some type of malware or whatnot. You can scan
them. It’s the same typical thing. That’s just how we came up with doing this stuff back then.
Nobody else was doing that, keep in mind. We came up with that method
to say hey, you’re gonna get cheats. Here you go, [00:10:00] here’s the file; run it.
They’ll log in and then – there’s some stories. I’ll log in and people will log in real quick,
take all their stuff. I’ll have a couple guys standing by the bank. We’ll just steal all their
things, go to their house, and then I’ll go and delete their characters. These people spend years
leveling up their dudes and stuff and I’d just delete – confirm Yes or No, yes, gone. There’s
no recovery. It’s over. I would probably commit suicide if that happened to my account.
JACK: You’re so cold, man. MOBMAN: Dude, I look back and it’s like,
oh my god, those poor little kids. You know? It’s so bad. So I’ll delete all their shit and
then we’ll make a new character, dress it up with a skirt or something, whatever, just fuck with
them. Then they eventually figure it out. JACK: What they figured out is that they’ve been
hacked and that somebody logged into their account, stole all their items, and deleted
their character. This would be a character that they had worked on for years and it’s all of a
sudden gone. High-level players that were wiped out by Mobman and hit with this Sub7 virus must
have felt a level of rage like no other. MOBMAN: But they can’t prove or know anything.
I can’t even keep up. I get so many people – I had so many people
that I had coming back to me where I could go and log into their accounts.
Not just their accounts in UO but I could log into their computers.
Now, I don’t really log into computers but there were a couple times where some of them had webcams
and I’ll turn on their webcam ‘cause that was another option. You could turn on their webcam
and watch them. I see their moms be up on their computer watching some sexual stuff, you know? I
could tell you some stories about that. JACK:
This Sub7 virus was working really well for Mobman.
He was able to social engineer dozens of players to install the virus and he was able to take
tons of in-game items and gold from them. MOBMAN: Right, so I started getting overwhelmed
in the UO. I started making so much bank, so much money, and being awesome and getting
all these people and stuff like that. I wanted to share it with my other buddies,
my friends that were in my clan, or guild that we had. I sent it to those ding dongs on ICQ.
I’m like here’s the client, here’s how you use it, go start sending it to people. Do what I
do. Y’all have been hanging out; you all see how it works and stuff ‘cause we’re all on ICQ. They
started using it and then sending it to people and then apparently they sent it to their friends
and their friends sent it to their friends. Then they built the fucking website
and started giving it away to everybody and stuff like that. The next thing I know,
everybody knows about Sub7. I see other idiots in UO like hey, you want to get a cheat? Blah,
blah, blah. I’m like sure, yeah, what’s your ICQ number? They’ll try to send it to me and infect me
with it. I’m like, that’s fucking pretty awesome. I’m gonna have a talk with my friends because I
told them not to give it out but they did. They gave it out and spread it. I’m not the one that
gave it away to everybody if you will, or made the website or anything. That was my
ding dong juvenile delinquent friends. JACK: Even though Sub7 was created to steal Ultima
Online log ins, Mobman had built a lot of features into it like the ability to grab any file, change
files, upload files, and turn the webcam on. Sub7 started to spread and was used by all kinds of
different people for all kinds of different reasons. Some students would infect their
teachers with it and change their grades. MOBMAN: They sent it to their friend and they’re
playing the cup holder game, opening, closing the CD ROM. They got them inspired and interested in
computers ‘cause they have to learn social engineering. You have to convince somebody
to open the file and run it. It got people learning about the operating systems.
JACK: But some people already knew how computers worked and took this to the next level, infecting
dozens and hundreds of people at a time. MOBMAN: You could attach it to anything, though.
First there’s a button like Browse and then you pick an executable like Calculator. Then
you click Meld and it’ll meld the malware with the executable and the executable will
still run and act normal except it has – Sub7 infects you when you run it.
JACK: I started thinking about some of the stuff I downloaded back in the warez days. I’m pretty
sure I probably downloaded this. MOBMAN: Oh yeah, you got infected.
JACK: As a kid I did download a lot of shitty things and ran them. As I think back, [00:15:00] I
do remember getting my grandma’s computer infected with the Sub7 virus and having to learn how to
wipe it off. I never thought I’d ever meet the maker of that virus that hit me in 2002. This
is why even today you should never run a program that you don’t trust because it could infect you
with Sub7 or another Trojan. This malware that Mobman made was spreading all over the internet
like an unchecked disease. Mobman only used Sub7 to steal Ultima Online logins for himself.
He never used it to steal anyone’s credit cards, bank statements, or anything like that.
MOBMAN: I just don’t like stealing credit card – you know, money or
things from them. ‘Cause Ultima Online I didn’t think of it like that because it was virtual.
It was on the internet. I think of my grandma. I always get the image of my little old lady grandma
and if somebody would rob her I would kill that person. Know what I mean?
JACK: Mobman finished high school with good grades but his obsession with video games grew stronger.
Because he was tapping into his neighbor’s phone lines and spending all night on the computer, his
relationship with his parents evaporated. MOBMAN: Yeah, they don’t ever talk to me,
during all that whole time. I was disowned as a child.
JACK: Because of this he hardly ever went home.
MOBMAN: No, I wasn’t. Most of the time I was staying over at my girlfriend’s
apartment or whatever, or out over at friends’ houses couch-surfing,
trying to get on that internet. JACK: He was drawn like a moth to a flame.
He would go wherever he could find free internet access.
MOBMAN: Video games ruined my – Ultima Online ruined my life, or my early livelihood.
I’m like, eighteen at this – or I was about to turn eighteen
and I got a cell phone. I was seventeen. They let me sign the contract ‘cause they’re idiots.
I thought you had to be eighteen to sign a legal binding contract. I got a phone bill; it was like,
$900 and that’s a lot of money. JACK: He looks at the bill and it says
he called Kansas and some other states for an
ungodly amount of time. MOBMAN: I never – I don’t know anybody in
Kansas or Arkansas or wherever the hell – I didn’t make these calls.
JACK: He decides to refute the bill with AT&T.
MOBMAN: Let me call them up and see what the hell this $900 charge is. They said
I called somebody in Kansas or Wisconsin. I don’t even know anybody up in that state. I
did not call somebody up there for twenty hours. You need to remove this $900 bill
charge on my phone. They’re like no, sir. We’re not gonna do that. You made that call and you’re
gonna have to pay it or we’re not gonna give you service. I’m like, we’ll I’m not even eighteen.
You signed this contract so I don’t have to pay it anyway. They’re like, well then we’re gonna
disconnect you altogether. I’m like well, I’m just gonna log in and change it myself. They’re like,
we got smarter people working here than you. You’re a young punk kid and stuff, blah, blah,
blah. So I hang up. JACK: By this point Mobman has
developed a complex because of his previous online exploits. He was thinking to himself…
MOBMAN: I made this Sub7. I fucking own everything in Ultima Online, the greatest game ever.
JACK: After he hangs up with AT&T he feels powerless against this large corporation. He
honestly didn’t make the calls they claimed he did and there’s nothing he can do about
it except pay it. Rage brews inside him. He just heard AT&T tell him that their systems
are too secure for him to hack into. MOBMAN: I’m like oh, really? They think they’re
smarter and better than me, that they can push me around? I didn’t make these calls.
I get on my vengeful, upset – I see red. JACK: Mobman got a list of AT&T phone numbers
that had modems on them. He could use his computer to dial the number and
see if it connected. [DIALING] This is called wardialing. He would go down the list dialing
number after number to see if it connected to any computer in the AT&T network.
MOBMAN: I sat all night logging into different PBXs,
calling up all kinds of weird exchanges. I get into a couple of them.
JACK: Every once in a while he would connect to an AT&T system and amazingly enough the
systems he accessed did not have a username or password. When you dialed into it, it would
immediately give you a command prompt. MOBMAN: Yeah, it just throws you in. Dude,
there’s no fucking security back then man, there’s no nothing ever.
JACK: This was an operating system Mobman had never seen before, some weird, AT&T terminal or
something so he didn’t know any commands. MOBMAN: I’m typing like, question mark and help
and stuff. It gives you a little list of commands. You type in that command
and type help. You keep getting lists of different stuff and try to figure out what
everything freaking does. [00:20:00] JACK: He keeps getting access to one system
after another and he’s exploring and learning the AT&T network, studying it,
mapping it. He keeps going deeper. MOBMAN: Man, if they had Red Bulls back then
I’d be just on more Red Bulls. It was a natural high. It’s like, I don’t know, you’re just
doing it. It’s like the whole world closed off. I get enveloped, enclosed into that –
it’s me, the computer, that’s it. You could be – house is on fire and I wouldn’t even know.
JACK: Mobman spends eight hours gaining access into AT&T’s network, slowly making progress but
still nothing significant yet. MOBMAN: Eventually I typed in
the wrong command. JACK: At that same moment the
computer he dialed into went offline. MOBMAN: Nothing worked. Then I tried dialing
some of the other numbers that I was able to connect to prior in some of the other machines
and they were all off, too. Then I thought it was me, so I tried calling in from a different
address. That didn’t work. Then I decided to give them a call, call AT&T customer support again,
see if they can fix my phone bill. I got them on the line and again, we’re not fixing your bill,
blah, blah, blah, you made these calls. I’m like, I did not, blah, blah, blah,
but hey, how’s your all’s network over there in California and
Nevada and stuff? They’re like well we just have a big network outage over there.
It’s been out for a couple hours. JACK: He realized the commands he typed on that
computer had caused a major outage at AT&T. MOBMAN: Apparently it rewrote the firmware
on it and bricked one of these central switching PBXs which happened to run like,
the whole west coast telephone systems or something. I’m like oh, really?
Well, if you want to know why, I’ll tell you if you fix my phone bill.
I start bragging. I bragged to them; I sit there and I tell them what I did and all this stuff.
Obviously I gave them my name, my phone number,
and all that. [LAUGHING] JACK: Obviously that’s one of the
situations you probably reflected back on a lot. What do you think about that now?
MOBMAN: Yeah, don’t be an idiot. Nowadays obviously you’ve got VPNs and all that shit.
If you want to do something illegal, I could definitely get away with stuff if I want to now
but I don’t. I don’t do anything illegal. JACK: Mobman told AT&T how he hacked into their
systems, gave his name and phone number, and waited for them to call him back
so that they could remove the charges from his phone bill. He sat there after hanging up.
MOBMAN: I’m still upset. They didn’t fix my shit. I hacked all their stuff.
I’m waiting for them to call me back. I just get back on and keep trying to do other shit,
hack and do stuff. Then I think I went and played some Ultima Online afterwards.
JACK: A few days go by. Still no call back from AT&T.
MOBMAN: Yeah my friends, my girlfriend, and my mom got a visit from a detective
or an FBI guy or something and left them their business cards.
I was like oh shit, oh shit, [00:25:00] what am I gonna do? I had a job; I forgot what I was doing.
I was working at Taco Bell or some shit and these detective people were looking for me.
I was worried that I’m gonna get picked up, I’m gonna get arrested, I don’t know
what’s happening. I said alright, well let me confront it. I had lots of friends, computer
friends. One of them lived in Washington and there was a library in Washington and apparently
that library had a database, a little computer that was like the White Pages. You could type in
anybody’s name or phone number, reverse-look up, front look up, sideways, whatever you want to do.
It has everybody’s information. JACK: Mobman uses this computer to look
up the information on the detective that’s looking for him.
MOBMAN: I get his house phone number and his address and stuff. I call him at his house,
at like 3:00 in the morning. He’s asleep
but he answers the phone. I’m like hey, what’s up? I heard you were looking for me. He’s like yeah,
I just want to talk to you about AT&T. They said that you were having some issues with them and
I think – why don’t you meet me up and get a cup of coffee and we can go over this stuff?
I’m like dude, I’m not stupid. You’ve been looking for me for like a month and knocking
on all my friend’s doors and shit. I think you’re gonna arrest me so I’m not gonna meet up
with you with some coffee. I’m not stupid. He’s like alright, yeah, I get it. You are wanted.
I’m gonna have to take you in. Where are you? I’ll come and get you. I’m like,
I’m not gonna tell you where I am. I’m not stupid; again, I’ll reiterate that.
But however, I get my paycheck Friday and I’ll meet you at my girlfriend’s apartment complex on
Saturday at the pool and I’ll turn myself in. He’s like okay, well, where do you work?
I’m like dude, really? Then I hang up. JACK: He wanted to do the right thing. He didn’t
want to be a criminal or a fugitive. He just wanted to face his problem. He thought he might go
to jail so he spent the next few days stashing all his computer files in safe spots all around the
internet and sorting out any loose ends. MOBMAN: I was like alright. I went and got
my paycheck and I went in that Saturday and went to the pool. I went and walked in there.
They came like, they had SWAT team there. A bunch of dudes with machine guns
surrounded me, basically, and put me in… JACK: What did you think as soon
as you saw a SWAT team? MOBMAN: I’m frozen. I’m just like, standing there.
What am I gonna do? Pull out my nine and start
shooting at them? JACK: No, I mean,
I would just be so scared. Like, why are there people pointing guns at me?
MOBMAN: I don’t know! I don’t care. It’s cool. My girlfriend, she’s there walking up.
They let me kiss and hug my girlfriend goodbye.
They gave me my cell phone. They’re letting me make calls in the back of the cop car.
I’m calling up my buddies; I’m like yeah, I’m going to jail. Write me a letter or something.
Then they took me to jail. JACK: His girlfriend was not happy
to see him arrested at her pool. MOBMAN: Yeah, she was sad but she was
good. She came to the jail and visited me a lot, and all that stuff.
JACK: Mobman was questioned and taken to jail.
MOBMAN: It sunk in the first couple days, like two or three days. It’s like man, I’m missing people,
blah, blah, blah. But then it becomes like a whole different world inside of jail. It has its own
ecosystem, if you will. You start learning all the stuff in there and whatnot. I was like,
the pretty cool guy in jail. I’m a young, skinny, nerdy fucking dude but nobody fucked with me
at all because I was the cool hacker guy that could like, when they get out we could all hook
up and make lots of money and do shit. Everybody wanted to be my friend.
I had it made; I was good at chess. I learned Pinochle, played Dominoes,
I got sent to Lockdown a few times. That was fun, got to hang out with all the murderer people.
Yeah, it was an experience. It opens your eyes. I learned how to become humble and
very respectful [00:30:00] in there. JACK: Strangely enough he was still able
to get on a computer while in jail. MOBMAN: Some of the guards there, the officers,
they were going to school for computers or they had a computer there and they want to learn stuff.
Who’s the guy they come and talk to about learning things? This guy.
JACK: Which was a lot of fun for Mobman. MOBMAN: Hell, yeah! They let me go hang out, play
on the computer, show them things. There was the law library. Law library was amazing. That had the
internet but you couldn’t get on the internet so I had to hack the computer locally. I remember how I
did that, was Magnifying Glass. Yeah, magnify.exe. I deleted Magnify and renamed cmd.exe to magnify
and then I went back to the login screen. You hit Windows + H and it brings up the accessibility
magnify which was actually command prompt and system-launched it for me. Now I have
admin of their little law library computer. Then I got everybody’s name, address, all the – I mean
well, not everybody but all the correctional officers. Got into their HR department and got
all their information, printed that out, signed up for pretty much every magazine on the planet.
Like, the mail that I got every day was bags, like those big garbage bags full of mail.