Cybercriminals, the shadowy online figures often depicted in Hollywood films as hooded villains capable of wiping millions of pounds off companies’ value with the press of a key, are not typically known for their outspokenness.
But this week at a Manchester university, two former hackers gave the assembled young people an honest assessment of what it’s really like to live a life of internet crime.
The teenagers in the room listen attentively, but the day-to-day internal disputes they hear are not the stuff of scripts.
“It’s just people getting into these online dramas and beating each other up and tricking each other and making people throw bricks through their windows,” says one of the hackers.
If the language doesn’t sound familiar, it should – “swatting” and “doxing” involve people reporting each other online by posting their genuine identities – but its message is clear: while cybercrime may seem appealing, the reality is quite the opposite.
The hackers are former members of an expanding cybercrime ecosystem called “The Com,” and they’re here for a very particular reason: to urge talented teens to use their programming and gaming skills for good.
The talk is part of an initiative backed by the Co-op, which suffered a debilitating attack in April last year. The retailer has teamed up with The Hacking Games, a startup that identifies talented gamers to test companies’ IT systems, and which wants young people to use their skills to help companies fight criminal hackers.
Conor Freeman, 26, from Dublin, was jailed for just under three years in 2020 for his role in a $2 million cryptocurrency theft and spoke to students at Connell Co-op College, near Manchester City’s Etihad stadium, last week.
Freeman became part of Com (short for “community”) after an older teenager groomed him online while playing Minecraft. The association began attending dark web hacking forums and eventually hacking into people’s crypto wallets along with other Com members.
“I stumbled upon a few different forums about dark web hacking and that’s when things really started to escalate,” he says. “I just fell into these different communities, different groups, became friends with a couple of different people and then found myself involved in large-scale cryptocurrency theft.”
Freeman served 11 months of his sentence and now works for The Hacking Games as an ethical hacker.
Fergus Hay, co-founder and chief executive of The Hacking Games, said there was a “100% overlap” between gaming and piracy. Describing gaming as a “live laboratory for skill development,” Hay said the skills learned in gaming – particularly modding, or creating software to help you alter a video game – can be used in either hacking or cybersecurity.
“And the people who have discovered that are the bad guys,” says Hay. He adds: “So what we have is a whole generation of natural hackers who have incredible skills, but they are invisible. No one has seen their skills because they don’t advertise on LinkedIn.”
Hay’s company has designed an AI-based test to identify skills among competent players who could make the leap into cybersecurity and help companies detect flaws in their IT systems through “red teaming” (or ethical hacking), where their networks are subject to attacks by savvy computer users.
Freeman was joined via video link by Ricky Handschumacher, a 30-year-old US citizen who was part of the same crypto heist and served four years in prison for the crime. The talk at Connell College was the first time Freeman and Handschumacher met physically. Handschumacher, who also came to COM through gaming, told the audience that he would have taken a different path if he had known that one could “get paid a lot of money to do the right thing.”
Computer science students who attended the talk said they were inspired.
“The lesson is that there are great opportunities for you to go into computing, but you have to be careful about what you do because if you do something wrong, it will quickly damage your future,” said 17-year-old Suheil.
Rob Elsey, group digital director at the Co-op, who led the organisation’s fight against a ransomware attack that cost £120m in lost profits, said the talks aimed to “help young people recognize that the digital skills they already have can be a force for good, protecting people, organizations and communities rather than being misused or exploited”.
The cooperative is planning more talks on Hacking Games at its 38 school academies this year.
In July last year, four people, including three teenagers, were arrested at addresses in the West Midlands, Staffordshire and London as part of an investigation into a trio of cyber attacks on the Co-op, Marks & Spencer and Harrods.
