◆ SpookStack

* dr weekyy | SIWeeKLy.cOM | News ; Deature 1 wruty ws tiaun,mceeseus syaisiyy OY fee Juan ween x brief and bemused ("All the News That's Fit to Hack," chortled the New York Post) and absent all but the most basic details about the young man whe could, if he so wished, ring up Warren Beatty or Rush Limbaugh at home. The basic details: In the past few years this so- called "homeless hacker," a drifter who rides Greyhound cross- country and crashes in abandoned buildings or on friends’ couches, has trolled, undetected, through the innards of corporate giants like America Online, Yahoo! (where he edited himself into news stories), the now-defunct Excite@Home, the now-bankrupt WorldCom, and, most recently, the Times. And he did all this using Internet Explorer, usually from a computer at a Kinko's. His methods are refreshingly low-tech -- he often exploits open proxy servers, which, after configuring a Web browser properly, can act as doorways between the public Internet and a corporation's private computer network -- and he always telis companies how to close the holes he's found. Lamo’s willingness to help the companies he hacks is part of his charm, and also part of the reason he has so far avoided prosecution. (Drifting around the country helps, too.) “In the computer underground, he’s very well-regarded," says Ed Skoudis, a vice president at the computer security company Predictive Systems and author of the anti-intrusion book Counter- Hack. "He's sincere, passionate, smart, with a good track record. Getting in and getting out without getting busted -- wow. And the thing that stands out about Adrian is that he's very open about the fact he's breaking the law. I don't want to get into his head, but he seems to think he’s OK because he follows the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. And you know what?" Skoudis gives a small chuckle. "Maybe there is some validity in the way Adrian does his thing, because his targets don't seem to disagree." That could change soon, however, and Lamo knows it. As it happens, one of the reasons I have such a hard time getting Into Lamo's head, or even getting him on the phone, is because he's been preparing to announce, in a few days, weeks, or months -- whenever he decides the time is right -- his biggest hack yet. On the record, he defines his target as a “critical-infrastructure-related company"; off the record, he exhibits ample evidence of his repeated incursions into the corporation's internal system -- incursions that are almost bound to be extremely embarrassing to the firm. He admits giving considerable thought to the company's reputation for aggressively pursuing hackers, and has been lining up fallback plans -- asylum in a foreign country, hiding in the Deep South -- in case the company lives up to its reputation. “In terms of my personal sense of the intrusion and what it affects, I see this as more epic than anything I've worked on in the past,” Lamo says, his clipped, halting words staggering out like text across a screen. "There's a sense of rightness about it. I believe it's broader in scope, but it also has more potential to go terribly south." So why do it? That's what I'm dying to ask him, and because San Francisco is one of the few cities Lame comes close to calling home (his parents live outside Sacramento), he generally spends some portion of his winter and spring in the Bay Area. But I'm not at all surprised to hear, when I call him up, that he's still on the road. In fact, as we chat, Lamo is walking 20 minutes to the nearest wireless sug vee http://www.sfweekly.com/issues/2003-04-16/feature.html/1 /index-html FBI{19-cv-1495)-176 6/20/2003