Adrian Lamo

Adrian Lamo (2001)

Adrian Lamo (born February 20, 1981 in Boston , Massachusetts ; † found dead on March 14, 2018 in Wichita , Kansas ) was an American hacker .

He became known through various network break-ins, including NBC , WorldCom , Excite and The New York Times , and the subsequent arrest. He later appeared in connection with the conviction of Chelsea Manning .

Life

Adrian Lamo, born in 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts, also known as the Homeless Hacker , was the son of a native Colombian and an American. His childhood was marked by moving around New England before his family settled in Washington, DC . His father wrote children's books and worked as a translator. Lamo thought he was an excellent philosopher. His mother gave English lessons, later she only took care of the household and took Lamo to political rallies. He was brought up to always question everything that is going on around him and to always form his own opinion.

Lamo first came into contact with computers at the age of seven and played with his father's Commodore 64 . When he couldn't solve a text adventure game, he looked for a way to have the computer output the solutions so that he could enter the correct answers in the game. The first step as a hacker was taken.

Adrian Lamo himself was of the opinion that computers behave similarly to foreign languages ​​in humans. The earlier you come into contact with them, the better you can learn their behavior and functions. Lamo grew up with computers and recognized the potential manipulative skills very early on.

In November 2000 he was registered as a co-operator of an AOL user website which publishes questionable information about the online service. For example, a security vulnerability was reported in AOL Instant Messenger , which made customer data available to everyone. It is unclear whether Lamo himself was involved in this hack.

From 2001, Lamo began to hack corporate networks. Like many other little hackers, he hitchhiked through America, was unemployed and messed with the IT security of large companies. At that time he was still referred to as a so-called gray hat hacker (“hackers in the gray area”) who only partially adheres to the hacker ethic . This stipulates that if a security gap is found, initially only the company concerned or the operator of an affected website is informed. If a solution to the security problem is then available, the security gap that has now been fixed can also be made public. Lamo, on the other hand, published the vulnerability directly, so that those affected were usually first informed about the hack through the media. This gives many people the opportunity to abuse this loophole.

Lamo himself saw his activity as neither good nor bad. He just does what he does. Many critics dismissed him as a "media-horny" petty hacker who seeks the light of the public and has no specialist knowledge. Some voices claimed that he was only made big by the media in order to attract new attention as the successor to the "superhacker" Kevin Mitnick .

An article published in Wired magazine on May 21, 2010 revealed that Adrian Lamo was diagnosed with Asperger's Autist .

In the course of time, Lamo also became known through several documentaries. He starred in Can You Hack It? (2009), Wikileaks - Secrets and Lies (2011) and We Steal Secrets: The WikiLeaks Story (2013) with.

Lamo died in Kansas in March 2018 at the age of 37. He was found with unexplained wounds on his lower back, arms, and legs.

Hacking activities

What was special about Lamo's way of working was that he did not use specialized hacking tools or other prohibited software for his attacks, just a standard web browser that he used to search for vulnerabilities on websites. He always tried to put himself in the shoes of the person who designed the network in order to analyze its structure and identify possible weak points. In addition, Lamo did not speak any programming language particularly well.

In 2002 he was invited to the American TV station NBC and was supposed to show his hacking skills in front of the camera in the NBC Nightly News . That broadcast was never shown, however, as within five minutes Lamo managed to hack NBC himself and break into the company's internal network.

Hack on WorldCom

During the hack on WorldCom in December 2001, Adrian Lamo used a program to search for open proxy servers on the WorldCom website and finally found what he was looking for, so that he had access to the internal network. After a while, he came across additional security levels, but his password he had cracked within two months. From now on, he had access to the HR department's system, which allowed him to view employees' personal information and reset their passwords so that he could access paychecks. At this point, he could theoretically have changed the bank details of dozens of employees to redirect the flow of money to his account.

Hack on Excite

Although Lamo thought the Excite website was very secure and did not expect to find a security hole, he went on a search in May 2001 and finally found it on an incorrectly programmed proxy server. Lamo rummaged through the network, found lists of customer login and password information, and came across old support requests. One case is known in which a customer asked support for help because personal data was stolen from him via an Internet chat. Lamo realized that even after a year this request was still unanswered and decided to pose as the company's technician and help the man. According to his own statement, he draws his satisfaction and drive from such acts.

A little later, however, it was no longer possible to penetrate the network via the proxy server and Lamo started looking for a new security hole. Using a reverse DNS method , in which one searches for IP addresses instead of website names , he tried different IP addresses before he found what he was looking for on several hosts , which were presumably field service employees. This gave him remote access to several hard drives and was able to install a remote access trojan , which allowed him to continue to have access to the system and to browse several databases and directories.

Hack on New York Times

While searching the New York Times website for possible security gaps, he came across a disused intranet page, again using the DNS reverse process, by trying out different IP addresses, which he could use to access an internal search engine. After extensive research, he finally found a list with all the usernames and passwords of all Times employees, with which he was able to research even more deeply in the New York Times network. He found a list of terrorist suspects from the United States, as well as one with the contact details of everyone who had written a report for the Times. He bragged about knowing the contact details of celebrities such as Bill Clinton and Havard professors and signed himself up on the list of suppliers.

Condemnation

The research on the New York Times network was probably a mistake because from now on he was targeted by the FBI , which had only been waiting for him to commit an act for which he could be convicted. The search engine Lamo used to research the network ran through LexisNexis , a host specializing in providing information and technology solutions where every research request costs money. Originally, the New York Times assumed damage of US $ 5,000 in early 2002, but LexisNexis wrote an invoice for US $ 300,000 at the end of the fiscal quarter. Three days after the FBI made it public that they were investigating Lamo, he turned himself in to the police; he was convinced that the FBI did not have much in hand against him and also wanted to challenge the alleged damage of US $ 300,000. Ultimately, in the summer of 2004, he was sentenced to six months of house arrest, two years probation, and $ 65,000 in compensation to his victims.

Contact with Chelsea Manning

On May 22, 2010 Adrian Lamo was contacted for the first time via an internet chat by Chelsea Manning (then Bradley Manning), a young IT specialist in the US Army. Manning informed him that she had copied 260,000 US State Department documents and was planning to leak them to the WikiLeaks disclosure platform . She hoped to get advice from Lamo, as the act was very similar to Lamo's previous conscientious offenses. Lamo himself saw this plan as a danger to many American soldiers and the national security of the United States, so he alerted US state security officials. The conversation with Manning lasted a total of five days, the state security officers read from day three and finally arrested Manning on May 26, 2010.

After Lamos' practice became public, many changed their minds about the former gray hat hacker. He was described as a "traitor" and the "most hated hacker in the world", but he himself asserted that he could not act otherwise, since avoiding the endangerment of human life would have been his top priority. Manning was 22 years old at the time, so Lamo could compare this situation very well with his own situation at the time and knew what a tough process Manning would be facing. He decided that Manning's well-being was not as important as the well-being of the nation. He thought Manning was an idealistic young man who wanted to do a good deed but probably didn't know what he was doing. When rumors later surfaced that Manning was ill-treated while incarcerated at the Quantico military base, Lamo became thoughtful and said, “There are moments in life when you have a number of options that you can't find right. All of them harm someone and one has to choose the one that harms the least number of people. That means you are still harming someone, and that's why I think of Manning every day. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Infamous hacker who gave up whistleblower Chelsea Manning to the FBI dies in Kansas . In: New York Daily News , March 16, 2018, accessed March 17, 2018.
2. ↑ Sam Levin: Adrian Lamo, hacker who turned in Chelsea Manning, dies aged 37 . In: The Guardian , March 17, 2018, accessed March 17, 2018.
3. ^ Adrian Lamo. Retrieved December 5, 2017 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Carsten Görig, Kathrin Nord: Julian Assange - The man who changed the world . 2011, ISBN 978-3-942166-28-7 .
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j} Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon: The art of burglary . MITP Verlags GmbH & Co. KG, 2013, ISBN 978-3-8266-9605-3 .
6. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Frank Patalong: Adrian Lamo: The disenchantment of the homeless hacker . In: Spiegel Online . September 16, 2003 ( spiegel.de [accessed December 5, 2017]).
7. ^ ^{A b c} Luke Harding, David Leigh: Wikileaks - Julian Assange's war on secrecy . 2013, ISBN 978-3-942377-08-9 .
8. ↑ Kevin Poulsen: Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized, Diagnosed with Asperger’s . In: WIRED . May 20, 2010 ( wired.com [accessed December 6, 2017]).
9. ↑ can you hack it? - Google search. Retrieved December 5, 2017 (de-US). 
10. ↑ we steal secrets: the wikileaks story - google search. Retrieved December 5, 2017 (de-US). 
11. ↑ Amy Renee Leiker: What killed the computer hacker who turned in Chelsea Manning still a mystery . In: The Wichita Eagle , June 6, 2018. 
12. ↑ Timothy P. Rohrig: Autopsy Report 18-18-0749 , Sedgwick County Forensic Science. May 22, 2018. 
13. ↑ ^{a b} Oliver Das Gupta: Bradley Manning, the betrayed traitor . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2010, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed December 5, 2017]).
14. ^ Bradley Manning, the betrayed traitor . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2010, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed December 5, 2017]).
15. ↑ ^{a b c} Adrian Lamo: "I think about Manning every day" - News - gulli.com. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on January 24, 2013 ; Retrieved December 5, 2017 . 

Web links

Commons : Adrian Lamo  - Collection of images, videos and audio files