of my own to follow the outlines of her radically more sophisticated—and perilous—exploits. Every detail I could verify checked out.
One Sunday afternoon, when I was in town again where she lived, I asked Alien if I could meet her at her office. “Pretend I’m a potential client,” I said. “Give me the big picture.”
Alien agreed. “Here’s what you probably know,” she told me from across a conference table. “Hackers can break into your computer and cell phones, your company network or the network of anyone you do business with. They can read your email and texts, steal your business plans and credit card numbers, or take over your online identity in order to hack someone else.”
I nodded, shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and turned off my phone.
“Here’s what you probably don’t know,” she continued. “Only about thirty percent of hacks target a specific individual or institution. Some seventy percent are opportunistic—hackers trying to break into anything they can, and pursuing opportunities behind any open door. If your information is valuable to you, it’s valuable to someone else. No one is too ‘boring’ to be hacked, and everything has a price on the hacker black market.”
I tried to seem savvy and unfazed. In reality, I wanted to go home and turn off everything.
Not so fast. “Physical access is almost as easy,” Alien said. Someone with skills like hers could enter my home or my hotel room, my office or my safe. She could copy ID cards, impersonate customers or employees, tap directly into phone lines or data centers, and uncover surprising secrets from my trash.
I’m moving to a farm, I told myself. I’m going off grid. I’m bringing my family. And I’m buying a shredder.
At this point the formal presentation started. For an hour, Alien walked me through examples of hack after hack. The health insurer Anthem. Retailers Target and Home Depot. Even security companies like encryption pioneer RSA and defense stalwart Lockheed Martin. The more I learned, the more I was surprised—and alarmed—by how pervasive hacking was and how diverse its forms and targets could be.
It was a story I wanted to share with others.
“Hacking today is a profession,” Alien concluded. “There are well-organized cybercriminals, loose confederations of defenders, and governments and businesses often more motivated to maintain the status quo than to safeguard individuals.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “A good guy or a bad guy?”
Alien shrugged. “That depends on who you are.” At this very moment, she was willing to wager, there were hackers just like her, sitting in a room a lot like this one, only in China or Russia, Israel or Nigeria, England or elsewhere in the United States. “They’re the bad guys to me. I’m the bad guy to them.”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the quiet eighteen-year-old woman I’d met half a lifetime ago. How did she become this . . . badass? And, given that her career spans the entire twenty-first-century history of hacking, what could she teach me about the evolution of a tiny subculture to an ever more powerful industry, both illicit and legitimate, touching all of us today?
I asked Alien to turn off the PowerPoint. “I want to buy you a drink,” I said. “And I want you to tell me your story. But this time, I want you to start at the beginning.”
// Part I:
Course 19
01 / /
Inside Out
Cambridge, Massachusetts. August 1998.
It was a beautiful seventy-degree night in late August. At two a.m., a young woman wearing one red sneaker, one orange sneaker, jeans, and a big, baggy button-down shirt stood in front of the public computer terminal in the empty lobby of her temporary dorm. She squinted, studying the screen. “Choose your username,” it said.
Her first day at MIT—and already a test.
The default was “ETessman”—her first initial and last name. Boring, the woman thought. Like something her parents would have picked. Mom spent her days running the one-room restaurant supply store in Hoboken that the woman’s great-grandfather, a Russian Jewish immigrant, had founded in 1915. Dad had his own small accounting firm. When she was growing up, they had been so protective that they barred her and her younger sister from crossing the street alone. Once, when she double-pierced her ears without permission, they grounded her for six months. Now, at long last, she felt free to choose her own identity.
But what?
Rock music blared in an adjacent courtyard—a party put on by one of the fraternities to recruit her fellow first-years. Finish this little login ritual and