Scottish computer hacker Gary McKinnon has been accused of pulling off the "biggest military computer hack of all time.”
Between 2001 and 2002, he infiltrated 97 US military and NASA computer systems looking for evidence of UFOs and “free energy.”
While in the military network, he managed to delete system files and weapons logs that paralyzed ammunition supplies to US fleets...
...and while remotely accessing a terminal in Johnson Space Center’s Building 8, he claimed to see secret NASA photos of UFOs.
He also claimed to have viewed a spreadsheet that listed the names of “non-terrestrial officers” on secret US military spaceships.
British police arrested McKinnon in 2002, but he remains free today after a 10-year battle to extradite him to the US failed...
In August of 2016, a collection of the most dangerous cyberweapons to ever appear online was shared by the Shadow Brokers...
...an unknown threat actor who appeared to have stolen the NSA’s most powerful hacking tools straight from the agency itself.
The Shadow Brokers are believed to have compromised the Equation Group, the most sophisticated cyber-attackers in the world.
The Equation Group is an NSA affiliate thought to have been responsible for the Stuxnet attack on Iran’s nuclear program...
...and the release of their tools could put world governments and critical infrastructure around the globe at risk.
Only a preview was released by the Shadow Brokers, but they have demanded 1M bitcoins (nearly $1B) for a password to the file...
...but what about a gun?
Thanks to Cody Wilson and his non-profit gun-rights group, Defense Distributed, you can do just that.
Wilson gained notoriety in 2013 when he released open-source plans for the Liberator, a functioning 3D-printed pistol.
Copies of the mostly plastic single shot gun, deemed to have “lethal power,” were manufactured the at cost of around $25.
Defense Distributed intended to become the go-to source for “wiki weapons” before the US government intervened.
Distribution of the plans were ruled illegal under an arms control act, but not before the Liberator ended up on the Pirate Bay...
Seeking to make the Dark Web even darker, Cody Wilson joined British-Iranian computer programmer Amir Taaki...
...announcing in 2013, that their Dark Wallet project was seeking to create an ungovernable and untouchable black market.
Dark Wallet is designed to launder and allow untraceable and anonymous online payments using bitcoin...
...circumventing any authority’s ability to collect taxes or police the trade in weapons, drugs, or worse.
The crypto-anarchists dream of a new “dark” world and believe the consequences, good or bad, would at least be “interesting.”
Dangerous groups have already praised the technology as a method of funding and have prayed to “hasten” its development...
What if the powers of all the hackers in the world were combined and made available to anyone at the right price?
Chaouki Bekrar may have created such an aggregator via the bounties offered by his “exploit broker” service, Zerodium.
Zerodium buys and sells hacks that exploit security weaknesses in systems ranging from government computers to smartphones.
In 2016, the company announced it was willing to pay $1.5M for remote jailbreaks of the iPhone and IOs operating system.
Once in possession of a dangerous hack, Zerodium can then sell exclusive access to the highest bidder.
Current customers reportedly include major corporations, the US government, and “other” unnamed nation states...