https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-high-school-dropout-hacked-a-million-devices
By Kevin Poulsen
Sr. National Security Correspondent
Daily Beast
09.04.19
The unemployed high-school dropout who hacked nearly one million Internet
routers, DVRs, and video cameras didn’t look particularly formidable in his
pajamas.
Kenneth Currin Schuchman, 21, who pleaded guilty Tuesday to aiding and abetting
computer intrusion in a federal court in Anchorage, Alaska, admitted that he
co-created the Satori botnet and at least four others that ripped through the
Swiss cheese security surrounding the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) in
2017 and 2018.
He met with The Daily Beast last year, about two months after his indictment,
on condition that our story was only published after his guilty plea. At the
time, he was free on bail and under house arrest. Largely confined to his
father’s Vancouver, Washington, apartment, he longer bothered getting dressed
for the day.
But Schuchman was still allowed computer access, and he was keeping busy,
trash-talking with other IoT hackers in the online chat room they all frequent,
and discovering still more vulnerabilities in the growing menagerie of devices
entering a dangerous 21st-century Internet with 20th-century security.
[...]
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