121–130 of 135 posts
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I fail to pickup on how the personality in the interview seemed strongly female. Could you give an example?
Not just from this piece, I did a little more digging and my impression was that this person comes across as female (based on the sort of language used, areas of interest etc.).
This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity. This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a 16 year old girl to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps). On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very w…
When I had a lot more time, I would go into Yahoo chat and basically phish for pedophiles usernames/passwords. I can tell you that a "hehe" after anything will set the hook. I could on average phish about an account a minute and I was never figured out. I only fell out of character once to warn an 18 year old kid, that talking to 14 year old girls sexually online wasn't the best use of his time. He freaked out and th…
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In light of recent Anon-related police raids, I would hope that anyone supposedly as savvy as "k" would rely on full-disk crypto as opposed to foolishly going the destruction of evidence route. I've used FDE for many years simply out of precaution against theft.
In the US fill disk crypto is useless. They will just hold you in jail until you hand them the password.
Assange has your back.
This could very likely be a carefully (and cleverly constructed) identity. This girl might not exist; but because we all really really want a 16 year old girl to be the hacker the discrepancies are glossed over (the art of a good lie is not giving too much detail and letting other people's imagination fill the gaps). On the other hand the personality strikes me strongly as female, so if it is an facade it is a very w…
On a more technical note regarding the described background, "Kayla" apparently started by learning how to break software and exploit bugs by her dad and grew up learning about the Linux Kernel... then moved to SQL injection. That last bit makes absolutely no sense. It's easier to learn SQL injection than the many, many different ways that memory management can go wrong. References to her memorising Windows Opcodes s…
I remember I started learning in C, reading security and working on perl all the same time. I didn't even know about SQL for a couple years after that. This was in the late 90's and early 00's tho, things were a bit different, but it isn't improbable nor impractical to have this learning curve in a semi-self taught way. It is even less improbably given that her dad probably taught what he knew best, C and Kernel stuff.
When I was a kid, my grandfather was an electrician. I grew up learning about house wiring, and how to do it properly and quickly. I learned how to solder and do stuff with wires long before I ever did basic electronic theory stuff. It never occurred to me that 120VAC was any more dangerous than a small fire. Imagine my surprise when in college I first encountered these professors who were terrified of wall current ('of course it will hurt you, just don't be stupid' is still how i think of both fire and electricity, the stuff isn't magic). I was confused when we went over stupid "this is how a dpdt switch works" and annoyed that we never played with any circuits more advanced than I grew up doing for over a year. I had never had any basic electronic theory at that point.
So: do you disbelieve me because I didn't learn in some natural progression as an electrician apprentice would? Because I didn't learn in the order the courses laid out in college?
tl; dr -- the idea of a "natural progression" in learning is just bunk.
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I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school. To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize d…
I am hoping you are hinting that this story is an exact replica of that behavior... pulling off a social formula, on a slightly bigger scale. Even if you are not, having gone through a similar phase back in early years with that exact same motivation, I am! This is a text book usage of social engineer. Putting in divorced parents, single child getting all the attention from the engineer dad making the kid an above av…
I would expect that the journalist as a filter makes this even more likely. The journalist would then ignore irregularities or dull them in the story presenting the most consistent pieces in the story, not the least.
I would say one advantage that I had, is I could test responses, over and over again. But that is always what allowed me to basically have a formula that would result in 95%+ conversion on the phishing attacks. The other 5% often times where do gooders trying to tell me not to be in chat rooms or to warn me about pedos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm big on systems and testing and generally more interested in people than the technical nature of technology. I just wanted to see if it would work. I did this off and on from the time I was 14 to 17 or so. I lived literally in the middle of nowhere, where the nearest town had about 27 people. It was an interesting way to spend time in high school. To me it was a big experiment to maximize conversion and minimize d…
Have you analyzed and documented the formulas you mention? This would be a first step into formalizing and eventually monetizing your experiences.
I'm not particularly close to this issue, but the sexism I'm seeing here is pretty astounding. If this were a 16 year old guy, no one would bat an eyelid. Seriously. Look at Mafiaboy back in 2000 -- he took down Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE, eBay, and CNN. I'm not even sure that he was 16 yet (I don't have his age offhand). Is this a crazy and possibly fake story? Of course. Does that mean that it can't be…
I doubt that the character is really a 16-year-old girl because she's telling Forbes she's a 16-year-old girl.
If 'k said he were a 16-year-old boy, I'd doubt he were a 16-year-old boy.
If 'k said she were a 33-year-old quant on Wall St., I'd doubt she were a 33-year-old quant. Etc.
I just seriously doubt that this character is giving any real identifiable information to Forbes.
Is the phrase "Windows Opcodes" (from the article) a subtle troll on the part of "k" or a journalistic goof? I'm no programmer by any stretch, but that phrase jumped out at me as phony. I know there are system calls for operating systems, and opcodes are processor instructions, so this use of the term raised my b.s. meter a notch.
correct. opcodes are unique to a processor architecture, not an operating system.
My bs meter was high for a number of reasons. This paragraph was the most notable: "Meanwhile she refuses to be chained to her computer, limiting herself to a few hours a night online. She rarely visits online forums "they’re boring"and a few days a week takes a course in college to further her goal of being a teacher. She lives in an English-speaking country not the U.K.but won’t say more about it" So the previous p…
> Add in the admission she deletes all her emails and wipes all her drives clean? Really? Does this person memorize every line of code she uses then? I agree that the persona is bullshit and that 'she' is a probably a mid-to-late 20s male but... Where does it say that she/he deletes wipes all her drives clean? It only says that (s)he wipes her web accounts. From reading the article, (s)he keeps her personal files/doc…
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Couldn't they just attempt to fill the "outside" partition up? I mean, let's say you have a 1TB partition with a 100GB hidden volume inside. What happens if somebody tries to write more than 900GB into the outside partition?
The OS has absolutely no knowledge of the hidden partition - as far as it knows, that area is just empty space on the disk. TrueCrypt runs from a bootloader (which you can have on a separate CD!), prompting you for a password. It uses that password to attempt to decrypt the (encrypted) volume headers - note the rest of the disk is encrypted too. Unless you install TrueCrypt the software application, there is no indic…
When the police demand the key from you, you give them the one that unlocks the clean partition. Now, at this point it doesn't matter if they don't believe you, it doesn't matter if they know all about truecrypt and hidden partitions, there is no way for them to prove in a court of law or otherwise that there is a hidden partition there. You can just keep telling them "I gave you the password! I just wipe my free space with noise every night! It's just noise!" and you have plausible deniability.
As far as I'm aware this is only in theory. I'm not aware of any case of this actually being tested in court. But mathematically, it is apparently sound.