Leave no trace: how a teenage hacker lost himself online

&gt;According to the public prosecutor, it constituted “one of the most serious hacks in the Netherlands’ history”. Edwin’s work was “ingenious” and the “impact on KPN and thus on society at large, immense”. By KPN’s own reckoning, it cost them €3m.<p>So much potential in this young man. It&#x27;s a shame he had these difficulties to deal with. It sounds like he had absolutely no guidance, no encouragement toward a positive way to use his skills. I see it as the equivalent of the school prankster falling in with the wrong crowd, and ending up doing something seriously harmful to try to gain respect.<p>&gt; found guilty of hacking and given a suspended prison sentence of 240 days plus community service. He didn’t want to do community service, however, so did the time instead.<p>I wish they had dug into that a little bit more. What did the service entail? How could it be worse than doing time? I don&#x27;t imagine it would have been a highly social or physically demanding job.<p>&gt;Edwin asked Ruud if he could move back home, but his dad didn’t feel up to the task of taking in his now 22-year-old son.<p>That&#x27;s heartbreaking. Having to turn away your son who is desperate need of care because you can&#x27;t provide it, and then having him commit suicide a while later.<p>This story is depressing. I wish there was more about how people were trying to help him, because as it stands, it seems to me he was mostly abandoned.

&gt; Edwin’s actions, he charged, had been “malicious and deliberate” and caused “imminent danger to life”.<p>If the script kiddie breaking in was being charged with such serious crimes, what about the people who allowed this to happen<p>&gt; Scanning the rest of the network from the KPN machine he’d accessed, Edwin saw the obsolete software being used in hundreds of places. Almost every computer server in the telecom provider’s vast network had a window open. The kid from Barendrecht strolled around unimpeded, and what he saw astonished him. He could control 514 computer servers. He could even access the core router, the backbone of KPN’s entire network. He could see the data of 2.1 million KPN customers<p>Their seriously negligent actions. This isn&#x27;t someone exploiting a bug a couple of days after it came out, this is gross negligence of a system that, if hacked, can cause imminent danger to life.

His brain clearly developed little to no social reading skills but plenty of abstract and analytical thinking. Kids with brains like that feel incredibly lonely and he clearly need some kind of social interaction with peers with similar mental skills. If he had been given an opportunity to learn and interact with computer problems in a healthy, constructive way with peers, the outcome might have been dramatically different.<p>I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere with nobody to talk to about the things I found truly interesting. Instead I would built things online and looked for ways to compete with my brain to get into communities with peers who were more like me. Physics, CS, Math olympiads, chess, star craft, a competitive high school, and building for the web. I was in poor Eastern Europe, but I still had options. If you don’t have constructive resources around you the path of least resistance is not ideal.<p>Government officials are elected, not picked for their mental skills. They need to recognize they have a naturally occurring resource of mathematically inclined kids and have open resources for those locally. Or you get lonely malicious behaviors occurring naturally instead.

I got into my school&#x27;s network when I was 10, people were furious for my hacking, nobody questioned why was there a security issue so obvious that even a 10-years-old could break in. Few years later I accidentally found another way to get in. I sent an email to the school&#x27;s IT department, got ignored. I sent it to the headmaster, he said &quot;Thanks, will fix it&quot;. Except it was never fixed.<p>Maybe fixing the child is easier than fixing the software.

&gt; the public prosecutor was scathing in his condemnation. Edwin’s actions, he charged, had been “malicious and deliberate” and caused “imminent danger to life”<p>The kid got into a network using a known vulnerability and all he did was send an IRC message from it and install a backdoor that probably had better security than the network itself. Deliberate yes, but not malicious and certainly not any kind of danger to anyone.<p>&gt; He could control 514 computer servers. He could even access the core router, the backbone of KPN’s entire network. He could see the data of 2.1 million KPN customers. He could block hundreds of thousands of people from connecting to the national emergency telephone line. He could redirect internet traffic so that people who wanted to visit, say, a news site, would wind up somewhere completely different. Edwin could do whatever he wanted and KPN wouldn’t know a thing.<p>See how the word COULD keeps popping up, but not a single example of something bad he DID. I am currently sitting on a bus and there&#x27;s a pocket knife in my jacket. I could stab the guy next to me. I have the capability and access. Are they going to send me to prison too? At worst what he did was equivalent to trespassing. He didn&#x27;t steal or break anything. It&#x27;s digital urbex - illegal only in principle, not because of any harm done.

Interesting use of the textual equivalent of the Kuleshov Effect (which I’m sure has a name of its own). The text presents:<p>- Kid was troubled hacker<p>- Kid played violent video games<p>- Kid threw game characters off rides he created<p>- Kid played lots of shooters<p>- Kid preferred Linux<p>You associate them all. I, on the other hand, did all these things. I did worse: I crashed cars into others for fun (Demolition Derby 1&amp;2), laughed as I destroyed cities full of people with tornadoes (Simcity), pretended to drown my brother (Mduel), etc.<p>Turns out that people can distinguish play and reality. I love my brother, but in game the point is to kill him.<p>And now I’m a productive member of society. How did that come to pass?

&gt; <i>His parents let him buy a PC that he put together himself. It had a big memory card and a lot of processing power. He set it up in his bedroom. Looking back, José thinks “that may have been our biggest mistake”.</i><p>I don’t think I like these people.<p>&gt; <i>Occasionally, his parents caught glimpses of what he was doing. Mostly, he played games, especially the kind in which people are violently killed – such as by building amusement parks and then throwing people off the rides. There were also lots of shoot ’em ups.</i><p>Ah, yes.<p>&gt; <i>Edwin’s contacts abroad gave him a confidence boost. He spent hours chatting with people from all over the world about ways to hack websites. Edwin often mocked “normal” life and western society. He denounced materialism and superficial concerns.</i><p>As if that’s a bad sign.

This is very sad, such a bright young man. The state took away his entire world, his community, friends, all in one swoop. Hopefully the authorities in western countries are not locking (fairly innocent) hackers in solitary confinement for 5 years without trial anymore....

What a mess.. He didn&#x27;t even do anything malicious to the provider by the looks of it.<p>&gt; Finally, the hacker made a mistake. He skipped the VPN and entered a hacked KPN computer server directly from his home connection. With that, he exposed his home address.<p>Also this part seems like a lie.

&gt;Edwin was less than a year old when he was taken from his biological mother. She was on her own and unable to care for an infant. For months, she didn’t even touch him.<p>I didn&#x27;t need to read any further. A long, long time ago, in another hell, I worked as a male nurse in trauma surgery and intensive care in a hospital near a &quot;socially challenged neighborhood&quot;. From time to time we had a little one there with a broken arm or leg. Two, three, four years old. No, they were not mistreated or abused, perse. They were just neglected. Shit happens when Kevin is home alone with just his two older siblings. Its not always like in the middle and upper class families in the movies.<p>Fortunately, we didn&#x27;t specialize in burns.<p>A mother once complained to the doctor that her four-year-old son had gotten much fatter after he was discharged from the hospital and that she now had to buy new clothes. Probably his first healthy diet since its inception.<p>So, how much, do you think, the risk of developing antisocial behavior later in life increases when you rob a child of their most important emotional need in their first year in hell?

From reading this article, I get the suspicion that not only the parents have no idea about computers, but neither does the author.<p>If I have only a single quote to proof my point, I would choose: &quot;His parents let him buy a PC that he put together himself. It had a big memory card and a lot of processing power.&quot; Never have I ever heard someone who knows anything about computers describe his systems to have a &quot;big memory card&quot;. If I type memory card into google, it shows the things you smash in a digital camera. In the 90s and 2000s you would put it in your Nintendo or Playstation.<p>My other favorite is his use of &quot;Rollercoaster Tycoon&quot; as an example for an excessive violent game (I assume he refers to that game. Its the only game I know that fits the description). Yes, it is possible in that game, that people die, yes it can happend by being ejected from a ride. It is how ever neither the focus of the game nor endorsed by the game mechanics.<p>Describing Anonymous as a &quot;looser collective&quot; seems somewhat unnecessary. What brings him to the conclusion? With the feeling of the article, I assume the reason is, that they are &quot;hackers&quot;.<p>All in all this article reminds me on the old articles on how computer games lead to violence. Or old US articles on communism. Or my grandmothers take on the Beatles. Or roughly any topic that a group of people perceives to be dangerous while not understanding it even remotely.<p>All in all, I wonder what anyone should take away of this article. Should parents not buy their children computers with &quot;big memory cards&quot;? Should parents be afraid if their children are using computers for gaming? Should they be afraid if they use it not for gaming? Should I be concerned to be confronted with a hacker if someone plays Rollercoaster Tycoon?<p>The guy seemed to have a tough live and his parents even more so. But this article will help no one to prevent anything.

That was painful to read. Mental illness combined with a talent for computers do not make good bedfellows. In-fact mental illness combined with <i>anything</i> invariably leads to a bad ending. I just learned of a word: parasocial[0]. It happens when socially withdrawn people seek friendship online and build credibility over time with their peers or &#x27;hacker buddies&#x27;. This is not so good because it lacks the nuance and real-time feedback of proper social interaction (i.e face-to-face talking). Then you could ask: what about video chats? Well they still pale in comparison with being actually with a person IMHO. Now we have this new word: &#x27;metaverse&#x27; endorsed by Zuckerberg and others. It makes me wonder where we&#x27;re heading with all this?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parasocial_interaction" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Parasocial_interaction</a><p>Edit: I&#x27;m aware how this may sound ironic since I&#x27;m conversing with people here on HN, but it&#x27;s not to extremes as discussed in the article.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;g9cOO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;g9cOO</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20211017155725&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2021&#x2F;oct&#x2F;14&#x2F;leave-no-trace-how-a-teenage-hacker-lost-himself-online" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20211017155725&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thegua...</a>

I was always a bookworm when I was a kid. I hadn&#x27;t had many friends and even at home had a lack of consistent human contact. Back then, we were going through a rough patch. When I started using computers and the Internet at work in the late &#x27;90s, it seemed that the whole world was opening up for me. When I came home after work, my folks and I would catch up with each other, engage in lively and thoughtful conversations over a meal. Once I had a personal computer, I began to spend more time surfing the Net than interacting with my family; they were having a hard time connecting with me, since I seemed out of touch with the real world. They were feeling neglected. Then came the smartphones and things went downhill fast. Now all of us spend our days glued to screens of different sizes, although we realize that social isolation or deprivation is risky for health.

&gt; I’d wanted to hear the story from Edwin himself. The one time we Skyped, he’d been in a hotel room in South Korea. Eight minutes into our call, he signed off with a smile and a peace sign. After that we chatted sporadically over WhatsApp. His final messages were laced with despair. “I don’t like it here,” he wrote, and “They’ve got guns”, and “I want to get out of here ASAP.” He stopped responding to my questions about KPN. A few days later I was contacted by a source. “Did you hear about Edwin?” He’d been found dead in a hotel bathtub, not far from Seoul’s international airport. The door of his room had been barricaded from the inside with furniture and pillows.<p>Wow, that&#x27;s intense.

Edwin&#x27;s actions were illegal and wrong, and his punishment was justified.<p>Having said that, it seems to me that once he had served his time in prison, it would have been in KPN&#x27;s interests to hire him and pay him a large salary to lead what was a clearly necessary internal effort to fix the security flaws that left them so vulnerable in the first place.<p>Directed in the right way, Edwin&#x27;s skills could have brought substantial benefit to KPN and any other companies he might have consulted with in the future. But instead he&#x27;s dead now, and KPN has lost an opportunity to hire someone that was likely more capable than anyone on their security team.

Obligatory link to the Hacker Manifesto: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phrack.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7&#x2F;3.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phrack.org&#x2F;issues&#x2F;7&#x2F;3.html</a><p>“… we’re all alike.” Rest in peace, Edwin.

“I’m more anxious about computers now,” Ruud admitted. When he fills in his tax returns and can’t get the site to work, he gets stressed out. “Sometimes I’m afraid someone might be using my identity. I’m forced to depend on technologies I can’t understand, and that worries me.”<p>Now try “Web 3.0”