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Securityrocus HUME News: “Sy Adventures in worladlom _ rage 4 or > ~] that doesn't require identification." Something of an urban explorer, Lamo sometimes goes ‘dumpster diving' with friends, rummaging for interesting papers, manuals and other corporate artifacts amid downtown San Francisco's towering office buildings. A recent trip to Washington found Lamo trudging through the flooded remains of a iong-abandoned electric plant along the James river, At 20, the hacker admits he doesn't yet know what he wants to be when he grows up; the question itself is absurd. "I don't feel obligated to set goals," says Lame. "Ali the interesting things that have happened to me have been the result of synchronicity and organized chaos." Putting himself in situations where "interesting things" can happen seems to motivate Lamo. Curiosity drives him as well. In a way, his Internet hacking is a natural extension of-his real-life - exploration. Born three years before the Macintosh, Lamo is part of the first generation of Americans to never know a society without personal computers -- a generation more comfortable than any before with the digital world. A WorldCom marketer might call him "Generation D." in fact, the company has another way of describing Adrian Lamo. The Helpful Hacker "Vint Cerf recently did a public service announcement in which, generally speaking, the message was it would be really great if the hacker community went back to its roots," says WorldCom spokesperson Jennifer Baker. "I guess that from a general industry standpoint, Adrian seems to be doing just that... At that end of the day, what he did wasn't destructive or harmful.” Over a month after the Kinko's visit, Lamo has come clean with WorldCom, and the company is grateful. The hacker contacted the communications leviathan through SecurityFocus on Friday. Saturday morning, just as he crashed after an all-night hacking session on “an unrelated project," his cell phone rang. There were three WorldCom managers on the line, wondering of it was true that Lamo had cracked their global corporate intranet, and what they needed to do to fix it. "I made it clear very quickly that all I was interested in doing was make it as positive an experience as possible for everyone," says Lamo. True to his word, the hacker would spend the rest of the weekend on conference calls and in email, bleary briefing the company on his months of illicit exploration, On Tuesday, the WorldCom turned to Lamo to give them a final bill of heatth. After a scan of their address space, he pronounced that WorldCom had successfully closed the proxy hole. "What we discovered when we investigated Adrian's issues, was that there was a router with an inappropriate filter on it," says Baker. “In the end it was a human error, and we're really happy that he brought it to our attention... We really appreciate his efforts to work with us" That instant willingness to cooperate, even to sign a non-disclosure agreement, with no strings attached is part of what's kept Lamo out of fegal trouble, for what are indisputably violations of federal computer crime law. In May, when the hacker used an open proxy to crack ailing Excite@Home's internal Web, adding himself to the corporate directory and finding @ route to millions of subscribers' records, he walked into the company's Redwood City, Calif. headquarters to brief network administrators in person, and he didn't leave before helping them piug the hole. Tt also helps that Lamo's never tried to profit from his hacking. “There's an intangible something I can lay claim to now that would be irretrievably lost if I did," Lamo says. The fact that he doesn’t hide behind a "handie” or pseudonym makes a difference, too. And once inside a network, there hitp://www.securityfocus.com/news/296 71712003 FBI{19-cv-1495)-1048