Teen Hacker Says "I Wish I Was a Minor Right Now"

Teen Hacker Says "I Wish I Was a Minor Right Now"
Two teenaged hackers who rerouted corporate giant Comcast’s webmail service for over six hours say they didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into. By Anastacia Mott Austin

One of the teenage hackers who participated in a rerouting of Comcast’s home page and webmail service for over six hours later said he didn’t realize at the time how much trouble he’d get into.

"I wish I was a minor right now because this is going to be really bad," said the teen hacker who identified himself only as "Defiant." Defiant is 19, and his co-hijacker is 18.

Defiant and his partner in crime, "EBK," talked with Wired’s Threat Level online blog about the incident. The two said that after they’d used "social engineering and a technical hack" to get into the home page they called the contact number for Comcast and told the guy who answered the phone what they’d done. They said they did this to offer a warning to the Internet giant that their system was vulnerable to attack.

After the tech contact hung up on them, they got mad and decided to take it one step further, redirecting Comcast’s site traffic to their own servers. "If he wasn't such a [expletive], he could have avoided all of that," said EBK during the telephone interview. "I wasn't even really thinking. Plus, I'm just so mad at Comcast."

The hijack (my computer geek friends tell me this was not a hack, but rather a hijack…go ahead and try to explain it to me if you can) caused come Comcast customers to be unable to get into their email accounts for hours.

Defiant and EBK are members of an underground hacking network called Kryogenics, and they told reporters their motivation was simply to see if they could get into Comcast’s system, not to commit further crime. They say they could have gotten Comcast’s passwords for individual email accounts, but didn’t.

Handling the massive amount of online traffic from Comcast was no easy task, and the two stayed up all night (from 11:00pm until about 5:00am), opening new web hosts to try to manage it. They changed the contact information on Comcast.net’s home page to Defiant’s own email address, and listed the address as "Dildo Room, 69 Dick Tard Lane."

It might be funny if they weren’t in trouble now. "The situation has kind of blown up here, a lot bigger than I thought it would," said Defiant during the interview.

Fellow Kryogenics members say the two only broke into Comcast’s domain management system "for the fame." Former Kryogenics member Luis Altea told reporters, "I feel like [Defiant] did it for the publicity."

The two teens were expecting to be arrested at any moment. Defiant told reporters he slept in his clothes, because "…the last time they came, I was in my underwear with my dong hanging out…"

While Defiant says now he regrets the action, telling reporters he told EBK "the whole damn time" they shouldn’t be doing it, he feels no sorrow for the inconvenience suffered by Comcast.

"Comcast is just a huge corporation, and we wanted to take them out, and we did," he said to the interviewer…defiantly.