D3f4ult
Appearances
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So that was our first segue into politically motivated stuff because it pissed me off. And it was like, we can actually do something about this. It's like, okay, well now nobody's going to pay you. So you're not getting any payments. So what are you going to do now? And honestly, we kept that part of their web server down for I think two months. So I'm not really sure...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
the equivalent of financial laws that they had for that. But it was significant enough for them to make announcements and changes and launch investigations into who was doing this. And actually, one of the members of our group got arrested for this.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
It was just kind of like us sitting around in our IRC chat rooms and being like, well, what pisses you off? Or what do you hate? And I remember somebody being like, I can't stand pedophiles. I think they're like the scum of the earth. And I was like, yeah, I think everyone could agree with that. I think everyone can get on board with this.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
You can go onto the forums where they don't, like, post, and they just, it's all text. And... You know, you find out where they're messaging people, whether it's on like, I don't know, like AOL or whatever it may be. And then you get their handles and then you go, you know, create, you know, all accounts and then interact with them. Kind of like set them up, basically.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And then you send them a file like, hey, oh, yeah, I'm. I would love to hang out, yada, yada, yada. They're all excited. And then you're like, here's a picture of me or here's a video of me. And you put some malware in it. And, you know, it could be very simplistic. I just need a port. I just need a back connection into this guy's computer.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And then just download everything that he has and get all of his location data and pretty much dox the guy. And then just send it to his local authorities. And we would check up on these people and a lot of them would get arrested. And it felt good, you know, like you making a change in the world, making the world a better place.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Like, you know, people preying on children is just like, it's one of the worst things that somebody could ever do.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
This is one of the ones that I think I'm the most proud of, I could say, was Operation Denmark. So bestiality was not banned in Denmark, okay? That's generally banned everywhere. So...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
i guess a lot of sickos were taking advantage of this lack of you know laws against bestiality there there was literally dens and like private places you can go and people's like animals were going missing and they were ending up in these like they called them dog brothels so sick it's so crazy and
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I had a dog, so that really pissed me off just thinking about the fact that like, what if, you know, being trying to be objective and be like, well, what if someone took my dog and that happened to my dog? I would freak out. So we I think we took down the official Denmark government website and then we actually defaced it. and said, did you know that your government allows bestiality?
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And there's bestiality dens where people can go and pay money to do these things to animals. And most of them are like people's pets. And a lot of people weren't even aware of, like the average person was not aware of that because they're just going about their lives. So everyone freaked out and it was like all over the news.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Yeah, the sleep schedule didn't exist. And it is, I would be lying if I didn't say it was exhilarating and like gave you a sense of power. And, you know, you start to crave that rush of serotonin. It's just like, you know, you get so worked up and you're like, this is... So awesome. This feels great.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
You know, not only are we doing something good, but it's exciting and I want to do it again and again. And sometimes like it's like you're almost like you're chasing a high and that can like lead you off the trail.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So all these different devices that are part of the botnet, you know, just like going through and like seeing where they're at or, you know, what they have access to. And some of the stuff that randomly would just get popped would be like an Apple TV, an Iranian WiMAX base station for like cell phones.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And, you know, you just pull it up and I start looking and I'm like, oh, this is some kind of institution, university. So pull up the URL, check the domains, go to the homepage and... you know, can easily access the admin panel. And once I log in, just pull up the finances of all the people and all the debt they have.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 owed like 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 it just lasts for decades.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So, um, just deleted everything. I went into the PHP shell and just sent everything to DevNull and just shredded it. So whatever I sent there is just not coming back.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
You feel good. Whenever you can make a positive impact in people's lives and the power of doing that remotely from 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
It is very long and strange. And honestly, for me, I lived it and told it so many times that it's so normalized.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. Cool. more schools, school of computer and intelligent systems, host providers. That was really cool. It was honestly like a gold mine.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
because we could literally just like keep spinning up virtual private servers whenever we need. It's like free web hosting, free storage space. Stumbled across a weird NSA Skynet program on a serious adventure server by like also like was co-hosted with the US Air Force. Super weird stuff. We're sitting on an admin login panel for Coinbase, which had access to hot wallets. Very scary stuff.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Thankfully, we didn't do anything with that. The Twitter and Facebook zero days, it was both just like a four digit pin reset.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I became kind of obsessed with like having the tightest object that I could have because I didn't ever want to get caught, obviously. And that kind of led to my arrogance also of being able to Literally, I got to the point where I thought I'd never be caught no matter what I did. And that just opened the door for doing anything hacking-wise.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I didn't care if it was Facebook or Twitter, which we had a zero day on and could access anyone's account.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. You're hilarious. He was like, click. Completely deactivated his cell phone like 10 minutes later. Cardi B before she really blew up. Chief Keef, which...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
He was honestly really cool about it because we gave him the account back. We gave all these people the accounts back. We had no malicious intent. It was just fun. It was a challenge.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I think it was the Snowden release that just like kind of like set me off where he was talking about the prison program and how literally it's not a conspiracy that people have been like saying the government is spying on everyone. They're like, oh, you're it's like, nope, actually, if you could see here through these
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
very classified documents that they are literally rag netting 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 what y'all are doing to us also. And that nobody's immutable. And we drove that point home very hard.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
like 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Started talking to him and we just like were 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... Kind of just like pissed off, you know. I wanted to like direct that somewhere for like a greater good as it were.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And that ended up being exposing the lack of security within our own government. We 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Most of it was just social engineering and then taking that initial social engineering information we gathered and pivoting. and leveraging that information.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
It was James Clapper. Yeah, James Clapper was numero uno. And he's the director of national intelligence.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I gave him a head nod. Like, dude, that was a sick hack. Like... like, respect, like, started talking to him. I was like, that was awesome. You really exposed this guy.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So we just started to, like, actually sit down and think of different people that... We should hack.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
John Brennan's account, if I remember correctly... Okay, you know what?
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
As a teenager, I was in Newport News, Virginia with my dad. He worked for the government, so...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
That I'm just like, yeah, I did this and that. And I went to federal prison for five years. They're like, holy shit. And I'm like, yeah, I know. It's crazy, right? Okay. Well, then I'm excited. There's a lot to cover. Yeah, I'm excited to do it. Do you want to start all the way? You didn't give me any kind of reference for how you wanted to go about this.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
This AOL email account had not only stuff about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have no idea why he also had his SF-86 form in there.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
No, not whatsoever. I didn't pay attention to that kind of stuff when I was younger. I was just a nerd, you know, liked to play video games, was very active in sports. Very active in sports, actually. I used to play like four soccer teams year round and was big into like competitive video games, like Halo, Call of Duty, even Super Smash Bros.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
He had somehow eluded Capture when he was involved with other groups that mysteriously went down after he had joined them. Also, 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 after some time we knew that we weren't going to get away with it. So we just like mashed 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
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
They were probably terrified because it was vast. It was like upwards of like 10 or 11 people, all within like CIA, FBI, White House, DOJ, Department of Homeland Security, Quantico, and then defense contractors. So that was, it was pervasive and terrifying. far-reaching to all arms and subcontractors of the intelligence community. They were like, what is going on?
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Yeah, we're actually calling some of these people too, by the way. I actually called John Brennan on his cell phone.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I told him he was a piece of shit. 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 y'all are doing. So hypocritical. Basically, y'all are awful people. Really. You're not doing any net positive things for the world. You're just not. And He was audibly shaken up.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
We read 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 it's a pretty jarring experience.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
We were some kids, literally, and just pissed off at the government. But they didn't know.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Eventually, if you're into gaming, you stumble down the rabbit hole of finding hacks to increase your experience in the game, whether it's modding or JTAGing or whatever it may be.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Like, once 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Jenny Psaki, the White House spokesperson, 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 a sheet that they want her to say, but I couldn't stand to hear that kind of stuff.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And this turned their attention to LEAP, which stands for... The Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal, it had the information on all FBI agents in the United States, like personal information.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. Yeah.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. He was handed it over, and he published it all, including his SF-86 form and the documents about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the leaked data. It's still on the WikiLeaks website, if I'm not mistaken.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Jabs, the joint agency booking system, everyone that's put into that from county, state, and federal level in the prison system.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. You know, it had gone all the way down the rabbit hole. I had just become very disillusioned with people's complacency and their lack of care for what was going on.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Since as far back as I can remember, I've always had a very inquisitive mindset. Like, extremely. I always questioned everything. And not just questioned everything. Like, I wanted to know how things work. I'm like... Why does this happen? How does this happen?
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So it's like, we're going to bring attention to this with chaos and mayhem.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Like, me and Crack are 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 going to get caught, but this is exhilarating. I don't really like, like, what do I do? It's like, okay, we're going to drop this database. Okay, what else are we going to do?
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Yeah, I think I was like 23. And what was home life like? It was terrible, really toxic. You know, I live 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 it's just like bets are off. I'll do whatever I want. Really, it became like my whole life.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Hacking really did. It was like, go to work, come home, hack. Go to work, come home, hack. It was just all it was. It got to the point where I 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 this very lonely existence. You know, especially if you're like committing all these crimes.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
At that time, I had a significant amount of money in Bitcoin. And I really just thought, you know, that was actually a key factor in like all of this. Like money was no longer an issue. So now what? You're like 22 years old and you have several million dollars in crypto.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Dude, that pissed me off so much that that even got... Contributed somewhat to me because technically, a conspiracy is if I know about someone committing a 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?
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I don't even want to be a part of the swatting. I hate that shit. People have died from that.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
The empathy is at an all-time low. Just like caring for your fellow man and the bigger picture. But people have just become very complacent and would rather just like,
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And, uh, I think it was like rule 41 pass where it's like, they can just like literally hack people now. Like they don't need to go physically kicking your door. Like, 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. So I was usually using the Dairy Queen that was like a half a mile away. It had free Wi-Fi. So their bullshit answer of,
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Oh, well, we pulled Twitter logs and he had his IP in it. No, 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 obsec. It was a process. Literally, my hard drives for my desktops had to completely de-encrypt, which took like 30 to 40 minutes. And then I don't have...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
That was like It opened my eyes to the possibilities that I'm not even aware of. I'm like, I want to know more about this. My mom just took away my internet. I just downloaded this program, hacked my neighbor's Wi-Fi, and I'm back online within like 10 minutes. And to me, that was so powerful. I took the power back from my parents or whatever. And so I started delving deep into this stuff.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
one of my friends who i thought was my friend and this is crazy over a female of course what 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
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Speak now, forever hold your peace, bro, because I'm going to do it. Literally, he got mad at me. And I was like, why didn't you be a man and tell me? You still had feelings for her. I would have respected that. And he's like, I don't know. So that kind of started it all. I didn't know he had ill intentions toward me. And So whatever, we move past that.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 hack, 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 going to name drop him, but he knows who he is. And that's some real scumbag stuff to do. Like, over that, like... I just could never imagine.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
He was always posting weird links in our chat, you know, you know, like a URL shortener. So like, Could have done some sketchy stuff with that. I 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
I knew I was hacked. My computer was acting crazy. It 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 on the second day, I turn it back on. After I get home from school and like... Start decrypting it. Takes like 30, 40 minutes. Okay.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. This little house. And they just sat on the front porch smoking cigarettes, looking at my house nonstop. So...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 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
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Okay, what'd they do? They definitely don't knock on the door, bro. They 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
They 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
No, 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. We had no idea about it. They were like, they assume you're lying about everything. They're like, come on, you know about that. I'm like, I honestly literally have no idea what you're talking about.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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 like boating down on me, like asking me if I'm part of HTP and like, where's Nakash? And I'm like, dude, like, I don't know what you think this is.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Like, it's not going to go down like this. And I think they were like doing a coordinated attack where they were like raiding us all at the same time because they didn't want anyone to be able to notify each other. It's true.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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'll look back on it later um and it'll be safe because it'll be on my encrypted hard drive well
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
uh 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 like everyone's gonna get COVID people are gonna die and y'all are still like coming in our rooms and like touching all of our shit and flipping everything upside down it's like so I recorded all this with like a phone I had and sent it to some reporters I knew
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
And of course, someone told on me. And 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
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. Even in the worst prisons in America, the penitentiaries, you have to let them out at least one hour a day. It's called 23-in-1. We didn't get that.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Just sharing my story with people, I think is, you know, 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. It's like, look, dude, it's not the end of the world.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Literally, you can bounce back from anything. You can change your life. 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.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Even when I look back now at quote-unquote Anonymous, I still cringe, but I still feel like it was necessary. It was like a necessary stepping stone in the hacking collective, conclave, whatever, to get to where we're at today. It was necessary. It was people congregating for similar belief systems and standing up for something. It had its place in time.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
It was a double-edged sword. Yeah, we're all anonymous. But so are the, you know, the feds that are infiltrating it that you don't know about. So that's why all of the really elite programmers and hackers spawned off into their own little small groups where they can vet the members and make sure that they're not feds.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Like, oh, well, go hack this website and basically commit a crime to prove to me that you're not a fed. Whereas Anonymous is just like, you don't know who's in here.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
It became very obvious, like, we need to move more underground and meet people. be a lot more selective with the individuals that we're interacting with on a daily basis. I moved on to basically doing stuff myself and becoming associates with other hacking groups. I started learning from Team Poison, MLT, I actually knew Trick, too. I don't know if you're aware of who Trick was.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So I didn't really develop any kind of like altruistic ideology for a little while. It was more just all curiosity based and learning. I was obsessed with learning more and more as much as I could because I thought it was so intriguing. You know, if I could shell this website and then if I can root it and then if I can like get access to all the other subdomains.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
It was really just a bunch of challenges. So I always was just pushing myself to learn new things.
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
So I joined into a group called Anon Ghost, which there were some really competent people in there. But as time progressed, their leaders started becoming radicalized members supporting ISIS. So I had to diverge away from them. And then I joined a group called Anon Sec, which people, I hated the name and wanted to change it because...
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
it got associated with anonymous so much and i had like a disdain for anonymous at that time like heavily because that's not where the most technologically advanced hackers were at like none of them are in anonymous and that really bothered me that some of our hacks got attributed to anonymous um i eventually ended up like taking over the group um
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
But I think that's where I started to get more politically motivated and we did a whole bunch of different operations. I think one of our first one was
Darknet Diaries
139: D3f4ult
Operation Detroit, where they were having, you know, it's like really similar to the Flint, Michigan issue with the water, but it had more to do with the corruption in the government there and the fact that they have a really messed up system for how their water is distributed.