139: D3f4ult

28:33And it all added up to$9 million. And he started to think, could I, should I mess with this? These people might, you know, really enjoy having their slate wiped clean, as it were. If you look, some of them owe a substantial amount of money, you know, like$70 ,000. I think some people owe upwards of like over$100 ,000. It's a lot of money, you know what I'm saying? It's like perpetual debt that sometimes just lasts for decades. There were 391 students listed here. He scrolled to the bottom of the page, and there was a button. Delete all? Why was there a delete all button? I have no idea, but there it was.

29:23So, um, just deleted everything. I went into the PHP shell and just like sent everything to DevNull and just like shredded it. So whatever I sent there is just not coming back. wow crazy how do you feel after that i've you feel good you know um whenever you can make a positive impact in people's lives and the power of doing that remotely from like your house is just like it's like almost intangible like the amount of power you can exert over the internet it's something that your average person just will never understand.

30:16Default kept going further down this path, getting into place after place. And the places he was hitting were starting to really add up. I mean, literally anything from banks, like I said, Apple TVs. We landed inside the Netherlands' defense gateway. Like, what? y 'all have the default SSH password set like you just haven't done anything with okay cool more schools school of computer and intelligent systems host providers that was really cool it was honestly like a goldmine because we could literally just keep spinning up virtual private servers whenever we need it's like free web hosting free storage space.

31:07Stumbled across a weird NSA Skynet program on a Cirrus Aventure server by like also like was co-hosted with the US Air Force. Super weird stuff. We're sitting on a admin login panel for Coinbase, which had access to hot wallets. Very scary stuff. Thankfully, we didn't do anything with that. The Twitter and Facebook zero days. It was both just like a four-digit pin reset. Now, each of these have their own story, and I've listened to him tell me some of these himself, and they're insane. And I'm sorry I can't include them all here. But I do want to stop at the Facebook login exploit he had. I became kind of obsessed with having the tightest obsec that I could have because I didn't ever want to get caught, obviously.

31:59and that kind of led to my arrogance also of being able to literally i got to the point where i i thought i'd never be caught no matter what i did and that just opened the door for doing anything like hacking wise like i didn't care if it was like facebook or twitter which we had a zero day on and could access anyone's account. What they did was get a Facebook username and then try to log in as them, but then say, oh, I forgot my password. And at the time, Facebook would then send you a four-digit code to your email that you had to type into the site to prove it was really you. Because after all, if you had control of the email that was registered to this user, it must really be you, right?

32:49Well, it was a four-digit code, which means there's about 10 ,000 possibilities of what it could be. And these guys learned that they could just keep submitting codes to Facebook over and over and over, cycling through all the possible four-digit codes until they found the one that worked. And they could do this pretty quickly, too. And just reset anyone's password that way. And then log into Facebook as them. I mean, we got into big accounts. Like, I got into Seth Rogen's account, got his cell phone number and called him just to tell him that I love his movies. And he was like, who is this? And I was like, I'm just a big fan.

33:29You're hilarious. He was like, click. Completely deactivated his cell phone 10 minutes later. Cardi B, before she really blew up. Chief Keef, which he was honestly really cool about because we gave him the account back. We gave all these people the accounts back. We had no malicious It was just fun. It was like a challenge.

33:56So while all this started out as fun and a challenge, over time it morphed. I mean, how can one feel this kind of power and then watch the news and see everything wrong in the world and decide not to use this power to make change? I mean, it really is like a superpower to just topple over a computer or get inside a system that isn't yours. With great power comes great responsibility, right? I think it was the Snowden release that just kind of set me off. We were just talking about the prison program and how literally it's not a conspiracy that people have been saying the government is spying on everyone.

34:42They're like, oh, you're concerned. It's like, nope, actually, if you could see here through these very classified documents that they are literally ragnetting every single packet in the United States. And they've co-opted all of these companies through the PRISM program. And all of your data is ours. And we're building a giant storage facility to keep all this forever. So if you ever become a potential threat to us, we'll know everything about you. so it really just set us off and kind of just gave us this mentality like okay so basically you're hacking all of us so we're going to start targeting y 'all and start showing that we can do to y 'all we all are doing to us also and that nobody's immutable and we drove that point home very hard.

35:37Like literally sat around and came up with lists of high level individuals in the intelligence community and then just started targeting them one by one. What? What the hell? They made a list of people to hack into that were high profile members of the intelligence community? This just went up to 11. I, okay, at this point, I mean, I'm fascinated by this because I'm always surprised how high profile people in government pretty much docks themselves, right? They give their real name and talk on TV and they have a phone number to their office, email address, physical address. All this stuff is public information.

36:18We know who their boss is. Chances are there's a Wikipedia article on them listing all this, or there might even be a whole biography written about them. And yeah, I always wondered, Doesn't that make them extremely vulnerable targets for attacks? Ah, I am so glued to the story right now. Okay, let's back up a second. At this point, Default has left a non-sec, which didn't affiliate itself with Anonymous at all. In fact, they were anti-Anonymous, but Anonymous seemed to get credit for everything they did since it was called a non-sec. So he was sick of that and left. But he knew people in this little pocket of the internet.

36:59And a group that he thought was doing some cool shit was CWA. And this stood for Crackas with Attitude. And the head of CWA was a guy named Cracka. Started talking to him and we just like, we're on the same page about being really pissed off about the government. And also a lot of the things going on in like the Middle East. Just a lot of injustice in the world. just kind of just pissed off, you know? I wanted to direct that somewhere for a greater good, as it were. So he starts hanging out with these folks from CWA and joins in on their hacktivism. And that ended up being exposing the lack of security within our own government.

37:53We are very vulnerable and the people running the show are not practicing proper operational security whatsoever either. So we're going to show the world this. And it was actually really easy. Like it was not super advanced. Most of it was just social engineering. And then taking that initial social engineering information we gathered and pivoting. and leveraging that information. Who was one of the first ones you targeted? It was James Clapper. Yeah, James Clapper was numero uno. And he's the director of national intelligence. What the hell? This would be a strong no for me. I would be out. You can't attack the head of U.S.'s intelligence agency like this and expect everything to be okay.

38:48I mean, I don't care how good your OPSEC is. hide behind five VPNs, use your neighbor's Wi-Fi, use Tor, move to an underground bunker. It doesn't matter. If you make it personal, they'll make it personal. They will find you. But at the same time, default was seeing stupid stuff on the news. Listen, this is James Clapper. What we do not do is spy unlawfully on Americans or for that matter, spy indiscriminately on the citizens of any country. We only spy for valid foreign intelligence purposes as authorized by law with multiple layers of oversight to ensure we don't abuse our authorities. The Snowden leaks clearly proved otherwise.

39:33The NSA was grabbing metadata off of millions of Americans' phone calls. This is spying on regular, good-standing Americans. And to hear James Clapper say otherwise Meant that some were accusing him of criminal perjury Lying under oath This enraged default And Krakow, our leaders were caught in a lie What more can we find on them? But Krakow was the one who acted on this I believe he acted alone, actually Kraka got into the online account for James Clapper's internet and phone service. Somehow from there, he was able to get Clapper's wife's social security number and posted that publicly. Then he routed all the calls coming into James' phone to a free Palestine hotline.

40:28Kraka posted proof of all this to Twitter. I gave him a head nod. Like, dude, that was a sick hack. Like, respect. Like, started talking to him. I was like, that was awesome. You really expose this guy. James Clapper was actually not the first person from the intelligence community that CWA hacked into. Their first was Homeland Security Secretary Jay Johnson. Kraka got into his Comcast account somehow, and Default was seeing all this and chatting more with Kraka. So we just started to actually sit down and think of different people that we should hack. Together, they teamed up. And, well, you know what?

41:11I'll just let Lester Holt from CBS News take it from here. Good evening. Did a high school student really manage to hack his way into the personal email of one of this country's top spy bosses? Federal agents are urgently trying to answer that question tonight after what appeared to be private and possibly sensitive information was posted online. Given the high profile of the target of the attack and the relatively low-tech method used, it's both a disturbing and cautionary tale that NBC's Pete Williams picks up from here. The apparent victim isn't just any American or government official. It's John Brennan, the CIA director since 2013 and a longtime key player in the U.S.

41:52intelligence community. A man who says he's an American high school student claims he hacked his way into Brennan's personal AOL email account by fooling Verizon and AOL into revealing enough information to reset the account password. Hello, guys. This Twitter account is going now, the apparent hacker says, posting what appears to be an actual spreadsheet of names and emails of current and former intelligence officials. The hacker blanked out their social security numbers. The hacker also says he got into the Comcast billing account of the Homeland Security Secretary, Jay Johnson. This was the personal email account of Brennan, not his government account, and it appears no classified information was compromised.

42:32Okay, so tell me how you got into John Brennan's account. John Brennan's account, if I remember correctly. Okay, you know what, I'll help you out. I mean, the year was 2015. Who remembers little details like this from eight years ago? So my research shows that they first found John Brennan's mobile phone number, and they did a mobile number lookup and discovered he was a Verizon user. So time to put on the ruse. They were going to call up Verizon, pose as a technician on site trying to help out a customer, John Brennan, but for some reason were having trouble. So they called Verizon asking for help on his account.

43:13Verizon is like, what's your employee code? They made one up, and it worked. The support technician at Verizon asked, well, why can't you just get into the account yourself? And they said, the tools are down, and we need to get this going quick because the customer's waiting. So the support technician was like, okay, sure, I'll help. What do you need to know? And this is how they got John Brennan's Verizon account number, his four-digit PIN, a backup mobile number to his account, the email associated to his account, which was an AOL email, and the last four digits of his bank card. Now that they had this extra information on him, how can they leverage that to take this a step further?

43:55Well, they know his AOL email address, which when you log in to AOL, the username is the email. So they had John Brennan's email username, but not the password. Well, time to call AOL. So they called AOL. this time acting like John Brennan. Hi, I've been locked out of my email account. Can you help me get back in? Sure, Mr. Brennan, but I'll need to verify it's you. Okay. Can you tell me the last four digits of your credit card number? Why, yes. Yes, I can. Because they had this information from the data they got from Verizon. Clever, clever. And so when they gave this information to AOL, This let them reset his password and get into John Brennan's AOL email.

44:46On October 12, 2015, they gained access to the inbox of the director of the CIA. Whoa. They started looking through his emails, reading one after another, looking at attachments sent. One attachment had a list of U.S. intelligence officials, which included their social security numbers. Why in the world was John Brennan using his AOL account to send emails that included social security numbers of U.S. intelligence officials? This is such bad OPSEC. Why, director of the CIA? Why? You know better. I think it just goes to show that no matter how much you know about privacy and security, we're still human.

45:34And screw up this whole security thing. This AOL email account had not only like stuff about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, like I have no idea why he also had his SF-86 form in there. Ooh, this is no good. The SF-86 form is the form that you fill out to apply for secret clearance, which means it has your entire background listed clearly in the form. Social security number, email address, telephone number, place of birth, aliases, passports used, prior addresses, names of your neighbors, what school you went to, your military history, past employers. It's everything on a person. And now default and cracker had it all.

46:24So you call Teresa password and it does not matter if you sound like a 14-year-old girl on the phone. You got the CI director's social? Like, you have to be him. I mean, I don't really have a choice, but to reset the password for you, it was over. Unreal. And Cracker's just posting this stuff straight up to Twitter as Cracker. And it wasn't just these two guys in CWA. There were some other members there for the ride, but Default was suspicious about one of the members in CWA. He had somehow eluded capture when he was involved with other groups that mysteriously went down after he had joined them.

47:07Also, there's a lot of psychological flags, like red flags, just like trying really hard to befriend us. You know, it was kind of like weird, kind of obvious. And then when I actually publicly called him out, he became a completely different person. and that was just another confirmation it is hard to understand you know fully my train of thought of thinking that we would get away with this but get after some time we knew that we weren't going to get away with it so we just like mash the gas and we're like you know let's hit as many as we can before it's over and it did like really they had to issue a memo because they were probably terrified because it was vast it was like upwards of 10 or 11 people all within like CIA, FBI, White House DOJ, Department of Homeland security, Quantico, and then defense contractors.

48:23So that was, it was pervasive and, you know, far reaching to like all arms and subcontractors of the intelligence community to like, they were like, what is going on? Yeah. We're actually like calling some of these people too, by the way, we actually, I actually called, I called John Brennan on his cell phone. Like, What did you say to him? I told him he was a piece of shit. Wow. And he asked how much money I wanted. I said, I don't want any money. I want you all to stop being so corrupt and committing crimes while prosecuting people for the same stuff you all are doing. Like, so hypocritical.

49:10Like, basically, like, you all are awful people. Like, really. like you're not doing any net positive things for the world you're just not and he was like audibly like shaken up I could hear it in his voice well I mean just a random phone call is not gonna be that big of a deal but did you say I've also got access it was his personal cell phone number we read him his social security number to him you know if you get a random phone call on your private cell phone number that nobody except for a select few people is supposed to know about, and some random kid reading you your social security number, I would imagine that's a pretty jarring experience.

49:57They were so relentless that people started going into hiding. At the time, the threat level was literally unknown. He was very stressed out. It's like the extra security they had to hire to relocate the CIA director and then the deputy director of the FBI to a secure location because they didn't know at the time what the threat level was. They had no idea who we are, what we were, what we were affiliated with, what our purpose was. We were some kids, literally, and just pissed off at the government. But they didn't know. At some point, they got into Amy Hess's account. She was the FBI executive assistant director for science and technology.

50:37Once you log into the portal, you can see the connected TVs. and honestly, it's like, I think it's hilarious, because I think it reminded me of something out of a movie, like Hackers, so we played that movie. I think what they did here is they called up Comcast pretending to be her and get her password reset, and yeah, it worked. And once they got in her Comcast portal, they were able to control her TV at home, and they just started playing the movie Hackers on it. This is a problem with connected and smart devices. You're not the only one who can control them. Amy claimed she suffered from psychological damage from this.

51:20And once they got into someone's account and messed around there, they just went down the list to the next person. Jenny Sackie, the White House spokesperson. I literally just, I took that upon myself because she was calling Edward Snowden a traitor, and that triggered me so hard. I was like, I have to hack this lady. Like, I know that maybe these aren't her words and she might just be reading off of, like, a sheet that, you know, they want her to say. But, like, I couldn't stand to hear that kind of stuff. So these guys were just ripping through all these high-level people's accounts. It was insane, the people that they were able to breach.

52:04But at some point, the two started talking and realized, wait a minute, we have all this information on U.S. intelligence members. What databases do they have access to? And this turned their attention to LEAP, which stands for... The Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal had the information on all FBI agents in the United States, like personal information. So somewhere in all this, they hacked into Mark Giuliano's accounts. He was the deputy director of the FBI. And using his information, they were able to leverage that to get into LEAP, which I think is really taking this to another level. To basically pose as the deputy director of the FBI to access a database that only officials should have access to?

52:53I don't know. This just seems crazy to me that this can even happen. Because why is this LEAP database even accessible from the internet at all? Yeah, and I think because they have agents all over, they could have taken security measures, but I think it would have been too much trouble for them. I'm like, y 'all just really don't care.

53:20That sentiment right there is what I think fueled default to go further. This idea that the U.S. government thinks that there's some elite hacking force able to break into anything. and steal anything, yet has a database of FBI agents' personal details on a public website, which is vulnerable to a teenage social engineer to be able to get into it? They wanted to put their thumb right in the eye of the government and make it hurt. How can we trust you with our private data if you can't even protect your federal agents' data? Why is the Department of Defense hacking into things instead of defending their own network?

53:56On top of that, why is the world even like this at all? Why is security so bad everywhere that the intelligence community can't even secure their own stuff? So Default and Cracker got into the Leap database and downloaded all the information they could on as many FBI agents as they could. Okay, but what are you going to do with this? You know, hit up WikiLeaks and it was Julian at the time running the account. And he's very interested in it, obviously, as he always is. And it happened very fast. You know, he was handed over and he published it all, including his SF-86 form and the documents about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the LeapDate is still on the WikiLeaks website, if I'm not mistaken.

54:51The CIA director's personal emails posted by WikiLeaks after cyber criminals said they'd broken into his AOL account. I don't think WikiLeaks posted any of the stuff from the Leap database, but they sure did post John Brennan's information. They got into other databases, too. JABS, the Joint Agency Booking System. Everyone that's put into that from county, state, and federal level in the prison system. Yeah, okay, so any person who's put in prison is in this system. And they found access to this very useful. They were doing things like looking up other hackers that were caught and keeping an eye on them, like trying to figure out, did they become informants?

55:29But also they were suspicious of some of the other people in CWA and there might be an informant within them. So access to this system was kind of like a way to run a criminal report on anyone you wanted very quickly. So they were just downloading stuff from these databases and looking through it. And that's when they found in these databases, there was a bunch of information about the Miami-Dade Police Department. Let's talk about Miami police. Yeah, that was another one. The Miami-Dade police. At the time, I really didn't care. I just like, that was towards the end of the run. It was just like, all bets are off.

56:07You know, it's gone all the way down the rabbit hole. I just become very disillusioned with people's complacency and their lack of care for what was going on. So it's like, we're going to bring attention to this with chaos and mayhem. So what happened to the police department? Now we got your motive, what did you do? Oh, well, we dropped their docs pretty much. This time it wasn't WikiLeaks, though. I'm looking at a tweet here which has a link to Pastebin. And in there is a list of 80 Miami police officers. Their name, title, phone number, and email address. like me and crack at talking and we're like both like physically like shaking because it's like terror and excitement at the same time you're like i'm accessing a top secret database holy shit i'm gonna get caught but this is exhilarating i don't really like it's like what do i do it's like okay we're gonna drop this database okay what else are we gonna do it's like i'm about to get the fuck off this thing

57:24At the time, Krakow was just a teenage high schooler, but Default was in his 20s. Yeah, I think I was like 23. And what was home life like? It was terrible, really toxic. You know, I lived with my dad. Living there was really bad, which I think kind of like fueled some of this. just like no oversight no real father figure to like tell me what to do and what not to do so just like bets are off i'll do whatever i want really it became like my whole life hacking really did it was like go to work come home hack go to work come home hack it was all it was it got to the point where i like estranged myself from all my friends and they didn't know why because i never told them and you know you can't that's just part of it it's just very lonely existence you know the especially if you're like committing all these crimes at that time i had a significant amount of money in Bitcoin.

58:40And I really just, that was actually a key factor in all of this. Money was no longer an issue. So now what? You're 22 years old and you have several million dollars. Yeah, let's talk about that then. So how'd you get those several million? Literally, mining and buying since 2011. I was so early to getting ASICs. I was like, oh my God. And these things were like 30 to 40 times more powerful than the average graphics processing unit at mining Bitcoin. So yeah, started mining a lot of Bitcoin. So John Holdren, I have written down here that someone tried to swat him. Yeah, not me. I have no idea.

59:27Honestly, I don't even remember him getting swatted. so the idea was using posing as him to call the police from his phone police shit and then getting saying there's a violent incident here and then them coming to his house dude that pissed me off so much that that even got attributed like somewhat to me because technically a conspiracy is if i know about someone committing the crime and don't instantly go tell on them I'm complicit. So it's like, because I was in the chat room with one of the people while they did this, now I'm a party to the crime. I'm like, what the fuck? I don't even want to be a part of the swatting.

1:00:10I don't, I hate that shit. It's, people have died from that. There was, there was some sort of current, there was an undercurrent of people online at the time, right? That you were mixed up in that was also, you know, very involved in this sort of thing. Talking about Anonymous, for example, right? Anonymous was always calling out injustices of the world and threatening this and that because people were just being evil. And it felt like being part of that was the winning side, right? It felt like... You're doing what's morally right. Mm-hmm. And I don't know if that exists today. I think today we've kind of lost that pulse.

1:00:53The empathy is at an all-time low, just caring for your fellow man and the bigger picture. But people have just become very complacent and would rather just be content with the way things are and that's a dangerous road to go down because while that's going on i can assure you that the nsa and you know the five eyes and all these other people that are colluding together are not being complacent they're actually you know getting more aggressive with the spine and the hacking. And I think it was like rule 41 passed where it's like they can just like literally hack people now. Like they don't need to go physically kicking your door.

1:01:45Like no, they can just hack you. And I'm pretty sure that's how I got caught is that the NSA got involved and I know I got hacked two days before I got raided. Well, let's talk about that. So how do you think the... How did they catch you? It's threefold. There's three things that contributed to it. Because the official shit that they say is so fucking hilarious because I never used my home IP address. I had a giant Wi-Fi satellite dish that could reach up to a mile away. Okay. So I was usually using the Dairy Queen that was like a half a mile away, had free Wi-Fi. So their bullshit answer of, oh, we pulled Twitter logs and he had his IP in it.

1:02:30No, I didn't. I've never fucking used my home IP address on that Twitter account. That's why I bought this. So I would never do that. I was so overkill on my Ops. It was a process. Literally, my hard drives through my desktops had to completely de-encrypt, which took 30 to 40 minutes. And then I don't have internal Wi-Fi cards in my laptops or anything. I have to connect it to stuff so it's not automatically connecting anything around me. Super paranoid, dude. I mean, you kind of have to be. And then after that, I'm connecting through Tor nodes in my botnet. I think it was threefold. One, I know was a contributing factor 100 % because he told me one of my friends, who I thought was my friend, and this is crazy, over a female, of course.

1:03:29what had happened was i ended up hooking up with a girl and i had asked him prior to this i was like do you mind it's like you dated her a while ago whatever do you mind if i like hook up with her talk to her whatever he said no i was like okay well i asked you so like you know speak now forever hold your peace bro because i'm gonna do it and like literally like you got mad at me and I was like, why didn't you be a man and tell me, like, you still had feelings for her? Like, I would have respected that. And he's like, I don't know. And then, like, so that kind of started it all. Like, I didn't know he had, like, ill intentions toward me.

1:04:14And so whatever, we moved past that. And then, like, the CWA thing happens. And we're drunk one night. And we're on, like, Xbox Live or whatever. and like i slip up for the first time ever being fucking arrogant and cocky it comes on the news ci director hacked blah blah blah all this stuff and i'm like yeah that was us blah blah i was like drunk talking and just totally like gave myself away but i mean i didn't think he would take me serious I guess like I don't know I was drunk but he did and he actually reported me to the FBI and then he told me that he reported me to the FBI and I'm not gonna name drop him but he knows who he is and that's some real scumbag stuff to do like over over that like I just could never imagined i would never do something like that to another person i guess just i don't know so that's one prong that's definitely maybe got them to look into me because of anonymous tip the other one is the person in our group that i know was a snitch but on what information was he able to collect about me i don't know he was always posting weird links in our chat you know you know like a url shortener, so I could have done some sketchy stuff with that.

1:05:44I really didn't ever click on those. And the other one was Julian saying that the NSA got involved, and me knowing that I got hacked. Yeah, so when they gave John Brennan's SF-86 form to Julian Assange at WikiLeaks, this really angered the Department of Defense, and Julian somehow got word that the NSA was aiding in the investigation. So Julian told Default to be careful. Then one day, default's computer started acting up. Something wasn't right. It was crashing and glitchy. And he looked at the network traffic and saw some connections to Langley, Virginia, where the CIA is based out of. I knew I was hacked.

1:06:23My computer was acting crazy, was having weird connections. Shut it off. I was like, fuck. And so I shut it off for a while. And a couple of days go by, one day and the second day I turned it back on. After I get home from school and start decrypting it, it takes like 30, 40 minutes. But I noticed when I got home, there was a black van or a suburban sitting across the street. And I didn't think anything of it. And also, now that I remember, very, very, very sketchy people had moved in across the street um this little house and they just sat on the front porch smoking cigarettes looking at my house non-stop so like literally minutes after my desktop decrypted and came online they came in like what are the chances of that like literally waited and waited usually they'd bum rush you like right when you get home or you're in the house or you're like somewhere they can confine you in a space and what it is probably is they waited for that to come on and ping whatever remote controller they had whatever server it was connecting back to to verify that my desktop was unencrypted what what happened they knock on the door tell me about that incident of no dude they don't they definitely don't knock on the door okay what they do they definitely don't knock on the door, bro.

1:07:59They kicked that shit in. They hit it in with a fucking ram. And all I heard was FBI search warrant. At your dad's house, right? Yeah. And I just like, before I could, all I had to do was pull the plug. And they had submachine guns pointed at my face and I like blacked out. He had his computer set up in such a way that if he disconnected the power to it, it would re-encrypt his hard drive. He just needed to grab the cord and pull it. But when you're sitting there at your computer with assault rifles pointed at you, don't think you're going to reach for that power cord. So at gunpoint, he had no choice but to let them seize the computer.

1:08:53They had it all. And I knew I was fucked. I was like, there's so much data on there, they're going to have a field day. They don't even know what they have yet. But I know. So I pretty much knew it was over at that point. They pulled you out of that room and someone else went in there to start taking your computer. They can't unplug it and take it. They know they've got to collect it. They immediately hooked up something to flash copy my hard drive. Yeah. And Secret Service was there as well. Because I think someone hacked Donald Trump's website or some shit. Which I had no idea about. They assume you're lying about everything.

1:09:41They're like, come on, you know about that. I'm like, I honestly literally have no idea what you're talking about. Why would I hack Donald Trump's website? I don't give a shit about Donald Trump's website, bro. But I guess Secret Service has got to get involved. So I'm sitting across from BJ Kang and some very stereotypical, tall, muscular Secret Service agent boating down on me. Asking me if I'm part of HTP and where's Nakash. And I'm like, dude, I don't know what you think this is. It's not going to go down like this. And I think they were doing a coordinated attack where they were raiding us all at the same time because they didn't want anyone to be able to notify each other.

1:10:31It's true. Around the same time, Krakow was also raided by the police, but it turned out he was living in the UK and he was a high schooler. So they took Default straight to jail. Police just weren't sure how dangerous he was and they didn't want to take chances, I think due to the nature of this. They likely did time it so that when his computer was online, that's when they would raid him and capture as much evidence as they could. How they knew his computer was online is a mystery to me still. Were they looking through the window? Did they hack into his computer and wait for it to signal out or something?

1:11:07His theory is that they did hack him. His computer was now in the hands of federal authorities, completely unlocked and decrypted. And, well, the stuff they found on there was clearly enough to convict him of many crimes. Screenshots that you had taken, bandicam videos. Oh, God, that was the dumbest thing I ever did. But how did they get the videos if you never posted them? Because, like, literally, like I said, like, I basically did all the heavy lifting for them because, like, I'm obsessive-compulsive with, like, archiving data stuff that probably shouldn't be archived like oh i think it'll be cool to record me doing this crime and i will look back on it later um and it'll be safe because it'll be on my encrypted hard drive well what if your hard drive is not encrypted and then now they have literal irrefutable proof that you recorded yourself committing a crime that they would have no idea you had anything to do with.

1:12:11There was one device in particular that he watched them take, and he knew what was on it, something that was very important to him. So important that I just imagine, as he watches them walk off with it, that his world just goes quiet and almost becomes slow motion. But he couldn't say anything and just watch them take it, because this was a secret. One of the things they took from me was one of my external hard drives, which I wanted back very, very much so. What it was is my Bitcoin wallet. I had a lot of Bitcoin on there, man, like almost a thousand Bitcoin. They had all the evidence they needed to convict him.

1:12:56He knew it. There was no way to get out of this. So he pleaded guilty. And the judge sentenced him to five years in prison. Was prison rock bottom for you? Oh, yeah, for sure. I got in trouble for exposing the prison that I was at and how they weren't adhering to any COVID policies. And it's like open dorms. So it's like if COVID gets in here from one of these guards, everyone's going to get COVID. People are going to die. And y 'all are still coming in our rooms and touching all of our shit and flipping everything upside down. So I recorded all this with a phone I had and sent it to some reporters I knew.

1:13:38And of course, someone told on me. The next day, SIS came and scooped me up and took me to the SHU, which is solitary confinement. And from there, they weren't letting me back on the compound. And they weren't shipping people because it was lockdown, full lockdown because of COVID. so I spent a year back there a year in solitary confinement it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life and there was a lot of people back there that unfortunately killed themselves because it's extremely psychologically testing to be locked in this tiny little cell 24-7 you don't get out at all Like even in the worst prisons in America, the penitentiaries, you have to let them out at least one hour a day.

1:14:33It's called 23-in-1. We didn't get that. It was 24-7 for 365.

1:14:46He read a lot of books in prison, learned about the importance of morals from an Italian gang, and picked up stock market trading skills from a stockbroker. And when he got out, he was banned from the internet entirely. It was part of his probation for a while. Same with Kraka. Kraka was banned from the internet for a while too. And he ended up with a two-year prison sentence, even though he was only 16. But all that time has passed now, and both of them are out and back online. Default struggled to get back on his feet. He couldn't find a job, especially being banned from the internet. especially having a felony record.

1:15:25So he eventually got into trading stocks and cryptocurrencies. He's still doing this now, and he feels like he's good enough to make a living from it. Just sharing my story with people, I think is, not just because it's an interesting story and people enjoy listening to it, but I think there's a lot of net positive results and things that people can learn from this that maybe they're not in prison or they're not going to prison or whatever, but they're at a low point in their life. And it's like, look, dude, it's not the end of the world. Like literally, you can bounce back from anything. You can change your life.

1:16:01You can change. You decide who you want to be every single day. Just because you made some mistakes doesn't mean that that determines who you are and what your character is as a person.

1:16:15You know, something I keep thinking about while listening to this story is digital privacy. And I'm not going to go on another rant. like I did in the last episode. But in this case, government officials were doxxed. These guys stole their information, they used it against them, and then published it to WikiLeaks. How does someone come back from getting their private information published to WikiLeaks? I mean, I'm looking at John Brennan's SF86 form right now. It's still there on WikiLeaks, and it's the very first hit on Google when you search for it. Everyone knows everything about him. It seems like anyone should just be able to do a password reset on him, you know?

1:16:51I mean, you could impersonate him over the phone because you have all his information. You can essentially be him, the director of the CIA, because we all have all his information. It's possible for someone to get a new social security number. It's not easy. You really have to prove to the social security office that you're in danger. I bet government officials at this level might be able to skate through that whole process easier. and I think it's easy enough to get a new phone number and email address. It's not so easy to just up and move to a new house though, but that's doable. It's possible to change your name too, but what's the point of that when you're a public figure?

1:17:31And that doesn't fix any of the problems of knowing all your previous addresses and who your neighbors were, your past employers, your friends, date of birth, hometown, height, eye color. See, I think with all the doxing going on in the world, I wish there was a simple way to just burn your identity and start fresh Hell, I'd even be interested in doing it yearly myself Just to always keep distance from whoever might be trying to track me out there And everyone is trying to track us I wish I knew what John Brennan did to recover from this I didn't reach out to him because I assume he wouldn't want to talk about it Because it would just be giving away more of his private information But I feel like we need a better system to help us The regular people out there when we get in this situation.

1:18:14Private information is not a thing of the past. We still need our privacy. But I think what might help is just better tools to stay private in general. You want my address? Oh, sorry, I only give out my proxy address. A postbox that receives mail for me, opens the letters, and then sends me pictures of those letters. You want my phone number? Oh, sorry, I only give out burner phone numbers. You want my social security number? Um, no, I don't give that out to anyone. Oh, what? It's for my security clearance? Sorry, that's not even a safe place to give it. Didn't you hear about what happened to John Brennan?

1:18:48These pieces of information on us are important that they remain out of the public view. Yet time and time again, they get into the public view. And it's not just from doxing. Data breaches, companies sharing your data, or you just giving your information to the wrong people. I mean, for instance, I had to give my social security number to buy Bitcoin. and now the CEO of that company that I gave my social to is in prison. So who knows where my data went? So I think we're way overdue for a better system to protect our most important data. I think we need to stop giving it out to just anyone who asks for it.

1:19:24I mean, I was at the store buying bananas the other day and they were asking for my phone number and my zip code and all this stuff. I think there needs to be fewer situations where we need to provide it. I think we need to be less reliant on our private information as a way to authenticate it's really us. And I think we need a way to recover from situations where it's been completely exposed. Which I think with the Equifax breach, most of us Americans have had our private data completely exposed anyway. I think this is a problem that needs to be solved. And while I think some solutions are out there, it's piecemeal and complicated.

1:19:58And I don't see anyone doing it holistically right now. There's something that still rattles around in my head from this story. That hard drive that the feds took, it still has his Bitcoin wallet on it. The feds never got access to that Bitcoin. It's still sitting there untouched. And they still have that hard drive and won't give it back. And the reason they kept it is because it has evidence on it. Data that he stole from various places. He asked them, just take what you want off it and give me back the drive. But they refused. 1 ,000 Bitcoin still sits on that hard drive. 1 ,000 Bitcoin today is worth$25 million.

1:20:42Just imagine$25 million sitting in some storage locker in a federal building. And the feds have no idea it's there. So it sits for years and will probably one day be destroyed by some lowly computer technician.

1:21:11A big thank you to Default for coming on the show and sharing this insane story with us. Like, this one, I was like, wait, what? Like, so many times. It's just unreal. If you like this episode, you should probably check out episode 109 called Team Poison. It's another story that was sort of running alongside this one in parallel and sort of same time and place of the internet. Okay, what housekeeping is there? Oh yeah, a lot of you are telling me you're finally caught up and have listened to all the episodes. If that's you, I want you to know there are 10 bonus episodes on Patreon. You can support the show and hear more stuff if you want.

1:21:44Go to patreon.com slash darknetdiaries. My favorite online hangout these days is the Darknet Diaries Discord. We have 17 ,000 members, but I can squeeze you in. So come on, just go to discord.gg slash darknetdiaries and come say hi. This episode was created by me, the slow Loras Jack Recider It was assembled by the corpulent porpoise Tristan Ledger Mixing done by Proximity Sound And our theme music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder I tried teaching my mom how to build a PC But all we did was make my motherboard This is Dark Knight Diaries