NORTON PRESENTS
There are hackers who are cybercriminals.
A man who goes by the name Guccifer.
The Romanian cult of personality portrayed the peasant son
alongside the great kings and heroes of the nation's history.
I hacked some Bush family members, Hillary Clinton,
I hacked so much accounts of the Rockefellers.
The Romanian man who hacked into emails from George W. Bush's family
has been sentenced to 4 years in jail.
The Internet was one of my best friends.
IN SEARCH OF THE MOST DANGEROUS TOWN ON THE INTERNET
My nickname is Iceman.
And I start hacking easy stuff. What it was in... '98.
And the most passwords were 123456.
The most of them. And like that I started.
RÂMNICU VÂLCEA IS A SMALL TOWN IN CENTRAL ROMANIA.
DUE TO ITS HIGH CONCENTRATION OF CYBERCRIME, IT HAS BEEN NICKNAMED "HACKERVILLE".
THE PHENOMENON HAS SINCE SPREAD ACROSS ROMANIA.
PELE NARCUS RAPPER, "HACKERVILLE" RÂMNICU VÂLCEA
This is my city.
Râmnicu Vâlcea.
The city where I was born.
It is an extraordinarily beautiful city.
It is said that Râmnicu Vâlcea
is the capital of hackers,
"Hackerville".
PRIEST CONSTANTIN CÂRSTEA RÂMNICU VÂLCEA
Human nature leans mostly toward evil.
But people make mistakes.
The cybercrime phenomenon may have started here,
so we gained a reputation.
But Râmnicu Vâlcea is a quiet town.
Picturesque...a mountain town
with a long history since it is very old.
LAST YEAR, OVER A BILLION DOLLARS WAS STOLEN BY ROMANIAN HACKERS
EVERYONE KNOWS WHAT IS HAPPENING, BUT OMERTA – THE CODE OF SILENCE – IS THE NORM.
UNDERCOVER CYBERCRIME AGENT POLITIA ROMÂNA BUCHAREST
It's complicated to say how it all started.
A lot of them go to work, but there are of course some of them that
want to take the shortest road towards a good life, so they turn into criminals.
As you know and now everybody knows that everything has moved online,
everything has moved. Technology is in our life
every day.
We shop online, we pay online, we travel, we book tickets, and everything we do is online.
You know, Romanian has gotten a lot of notoriety,
and rightfully so, in that there are number of skilled people there who've very good computer skills
who have turned to crime.
TINKODE FORMER MOST WANTED HACKER BUCHAREST
More that 80% of the servers and the websites around the world are vulnerable. It's just a matter of time.
TINKODE WAS ARRESTED FOR HACKING IN 2012.
FOR REASONS UNKNOWN, HE WAS RELEASED ONLY 3 MONTHS LATER.
When we take all this part of Europe, which is Eastern Europe,
you will see that cybercrime is something really, you know, known here.
NICOLAE STĂNCULESCU COMMUNIST ERA AUTHORITY RÂMNICU VÂLCEA
The legacy of communism is very complex.
Many of the burdens from that regime
still dominate aspects of people's lives.
Important changes took place
especially in the '80s and '90s, when Romania went crazy,
resulting in the creation of the so-called new human.
Because of the communism, we were quite limited.
We didn't have so many gadgets. We didn't have so many access to technology,
and since 1989 after the Romanian revolution,
the Romanians, they started to have access to this technology, and
they developed more and more.
It's like they were hungry, they were hungry for IT, for technology.
There are hackers who are cybercriminals, who understand how things work
and create the technologies to make crime happen on the Internet.
My story is simple: I'm in prison since last year.
GUCCIFER CONVICTED HACKER ARAD PRISON
That I was started 15 years ago,
and the Internet was one of my best friends.
GUCCIFER'S NICKNAME WAS CHOSEN TO REPRESENT "THE STYLE OF GUCCI AND THE LIGHT OF LUCIFER."
HE BECAME INFAMOUS DURING A TWO-YEAR RAMPAGE IN WHICH HE HACKED THE ACCOUNTS OF:
THE BUSH FAMILY
HILLARY CLINTON
THE ROCKEFELLERS
COLIN POWELL
FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD MEMBERS
I hacked some Bush family members,
Hillary Clinton.
I hacked so much accounts of the Rockefellers.
There are facts you only can find on emails
because emails it's about 30-35% of the Internet,
and there are secrets there.
It's much more curiosity, curiosity, to find out the ultimate truth,
to find out, yes.
That's what I was always looking for.
The Americans, they are scared of hacking like they are scared of terrorism.
Scammers steal. They are thieves, not hackers.
Hackers hack, only hack.
There are moral hackers. Black hackers, grey hackers, white hackers.
Okay, the bad ones are black, they do damage but they don't steal.
ICEMAN MADE THE MOST WANTED LIST BY HACKING A NASA JET PROPULSION LABORATORY.
HIS INTRUSIONS CAUSED OVER $500,000 IN DAMAGES.
Romania got really, really good at the Internet.
We have the best Internet in the world.
We have in all the places fiber optics,
and that's the most speed you can get.
I wanted to hack NASA.
I hacked their mail server, very secluded, and I left them a text.
In what I wrote, "I hacked your server and I secured it. Contact me at: email address."
And I thought NASA would give me a job or something, but...
only they gave me a fine.
There are also people that are taking advantage of the Internet who are scammers,
who are clearly cybercriminals, but they don't really have many technical skills.
And they don't really need them.
When you think about it, it's really just moving things that happen in the real world
but doing them on the Internet.
SCAMMER IDENTITY UNKNOWN RÂMNICU VÂLCEA
At first, I did everything out of pure curiosity
since elementary school.
I was among several friends meeting at Internet cafes
sharing experiences,
and that's where I first learned
how to access servers from abroad.
eBAY SCAMMER IDENTITY UNKNOWN BUCHAREST
Money came easy.
You could post some ads, then correspond via email
and fool them to send some money.
There were weeks we would have no clients,
and weeks when we would make 10 to 15 transactions.
$4,000 - $4,500 each, depending on the product.
Americans are naive.
I come from the university of the streets,
from the projects, from the squad.
I still drink beer on my front steps,
I live as I want and I am proud of that.
I do not abstain.
I do not maintain.
If we are bored
we go to the mountains or to the seaside
'cause if life is hard
we give it some wings
I have the nerve of a Romanian boy
I'm full of hope
I, Santa Claus and my friends.
A hacker is able to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in these infrastructures.
Definitely more skilled. More educated.
They are people that basically see you on the streets.
Normal people. You cannot distinguish them from other, you know, young people as the same age.
I was a black hacker.
Now I am a white and grey. Depends on who hires me for what.
I liked...being...I don't know how to say it...powerful.
The feeling of I can do it. I did it. OK.
My English is not so good, but this is the message:
Every American to open wide their eyes,
because something very wrong is going to come to them this year.
They are so comfortable in their life, and they don't want to hear that.
Did you ever hack for Anonymous?
Yes.
Who did you hack?
Government.
Which government?
I can't tell.
The threat is alway rising. Because the hackers find new methods to do cybercrime.
It made me learn something I never learned before, I would not learn.
I know I can do a lot of things if somebody gets me angry.
It was money earned quickly,
earned doing a job we loved.
You can guessing the passwords or the security questions.
I used to make my own worms, computer worms and sending to the victims.
What we see here is a lot of computer intrusions,
and the aim of those computer intrusions is to get the credit card data.
TINKODE FORMER MOST WANTED HACKER BUCHAREST
When I was 13, 14 years old, I saw some American movies with hackers,
which inspired me,
and then I wanted to see how it is.
Can you tell us some of the places that you've hacked?
GOOGLE
YOUTUBE
U.S. ARMY
THE PENTAGON
IBM
ORACLE
MySQL
FACEBOOK
EVERYTHING
The bee never collects from poisonous flowers.
So it is with the human: during his life he should choose
only the good things and plant them in his soul
to be worthy and gain redemption.
In the real life,
usually they are individuals, so they don't have such a network,
or they want to stay in their houses, stay all day in front of the computer,
do the intrusion, work on their skills.
When they're on the Internet, they are more social,
they get in touch with their peers, there's hackers, other hackers, around the world.
They learn from each other.
They followed me one year,
and after one year, they come at 6am to arrest me.
"Robert, get up! Robert, get up." "Let me sleep 10 more minutes!"
And they let me sleep 10 more minutes! I didn't believe that.
It's not about the money.
I feel what I do is good.
OK, look, I am seven years in prison here in Romania, for what?
For two email accounts. For two emails accounts. In a maximum security prison.
There are harsh conditions, for what? For an email hacking. Here in Romania. For two accounts.
This is not justice. Not. This is not justice.
GUCCIFER'S HACKS CONTINUE TO PLAGUE HILLARY CLINTON'S 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN.
Sometimes you need to hide, you need to be aware
that somebody would follow you, and somebody would look for you.
So you have a parallel life, it's not that easy.
There were times when I had remorse,
I could not sleep at night,
I was lying to my parents
saying I was doing something
but was doing something else.
And, what I was doing was illegal
and I was never proud of this.
Cybercrime is going to be the type of crime of the future
and a lot of normal criminality will migrate towards an online environment,
because also the victims become more active in an online environment.
So this is where the cybercriminals live, it's like prey and predator.
The predator always follows the prey.
Don't let the remove you have, that hiding behind a computer screen,
make you think that this is a victimless crime and that you aren't hurting real people.
But I'm not sorry for what I've done.
Never. Never in my lifetime.
One security guy can't know everything about security.
Can't, too many things appear new.
There will always be someone smarter and better.
There's a certain feeling like maybe we should give up,
maybe we're in the apocalypse, right,
because there's nothing we can do about this?
And that's just not true.
We get better every single day.
I believe that all companies
from the smallest to the biggest
should not be arrogant about security breaches.
Maybe these more complicated times
in young people's lives will be overcome.
I believe they will be overcome
but probably require some time.
Eventually people learn how to deal with the cybercriminals.
That's where we are now. We're creating this world that understands that they're out there.
There's always a risk, but we're figuring out how to deal with them and go about
living our normal life that way.
The threats are quite big.
The hackers become more and more intelligent
and they are more and more sophisticated in conducting their attacks.
So you have to be prepared.
When you go to war, you go with soldiers.
So you cannot expect that your enemy will wait you with some monks.
We use soldiers to fight soldiers.
Robert Frost said: "Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
IN SEARCH OF THE MOST DANGEROUS TOWN ON THE INTERNET
MostDangerousTown.com