Longform

A well-crafted, in-depth profile of anarchist and Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond, who broke into the private intelligence company Stratfor and released millions of its e-mails. How does a talented kid from suburban Chicago end up facing federal charges in New York for hacking a company in Texas—and why did it seem worth doing? This piece provides a few answers.

I wrote this one, but I’m including it anyway because it was based on full transcripts of two FBI interrogations of suspected cybercriminals and provides a unique glimpse of exactly how agents talk and act when investigating internet crime. Sample quote: “The FBI does not fly us out here and we don’t break into your door to talk to you if we don’t have a substantial amount of evidence against you.” It also features one of the craziest (and poorly executed) blackmail plots you’ll ever find.

Swatting—faking phone calls to local cops in an effort to have them send a SWAT team to a victim’s home—has become a national problem, with hundreds of cases a year. This 2008 piece profiles one of the most extreme swatters, a young blind kid from Boston.

The recent revelations that the new Miss Teen USA was being surreptitiously watched by a hacker accessing her computer’s webcam stirred up renewed interest in the practice. Using Remote Administration Tools (RATs), hackers with minimal skill can now infiltrate the webcams, microphones, and files of computer users around the world—and whole forums exist in which the hackers share techniques and pictures of their “slaves.” This piece profiles one of the highest-profile hackers caught to date, a disabled California man called Luis Mijangos. What really sets the story apart is the author interview with Mijangos, who explains why he did it.

What happens when a nation-state embraces the techniques of criminal hackers to target Iranian centrifuges? You get a custom-made virus like Stuxnet, for one thing, and this piece explores the virus, its operation, and its discovery.<hr>Longform is proudly sponsored this week by The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed. Buy it today.