A Hacker's Redemption (Part 1)

With these groups, he had launched devastating attacks on governments and businesses worldwide. He could go to prison for the rest of his life for these crimes. And so my mind at this moment is warning millions of miles per second. I mean, I'm telling you now, I had to figure off the next move because they had me. Do you had that I was a blowner. I was dead, you know, I was done unless there was a way out. Hi.

I'm brad Stone and I'm Akio. And this week on Decrypted, we're telling you the story of the former Anonymous hacker, Hector Monsterer a k A. Sobly. Over the years, much has been written about his cyber attacks, his arrest, and his subsequent decision to secretly cooperate with the government. A

lot of those stories, Hector says, got the facts wrong. Today, he's opening up about his full story about how a kid who grew up in the projects, who didn't even finish high school somehow came to break into the computer systems of multi billion dollar companies and governments. Will also trace his unlikely path to redemption. This story is divided into two episodes. This is part one, and if you subscribe to the show, Part two should already be in

your feed. Stay with us, Thank you. It's literally cold. In December, I flew to New York to go meet Hector for the first time. Actor. How's it going nice to meet Nice to meet you two than to make good time today. We started the day in the Lower East Side of Manhattan by the Jacob Rees public housing projects. This is where Hector's grandmother landed when she emigrated from Puerto Rico in the late sixties. She held onto that same apartment where Hector himself lived for much of his life.

You're gonna look up to the stage for you to see you a window with air conditioning. Okay, that's it, And and that was in my whole life, you know, Hector was born when his parents were teenagers. He says his dad wasn't ready to be a father, and his mom left the family when Hector was still young. She was trying to get a better life. She's trying to get out of this whole because once you stuck here, let me tell you, once you get stuck here, you're

just stuck here. There's not a lot of success stories here. That left Hector with two main parental figures in his life, his grandmother and his aunt. As a young kid, there was a good kid. He didn't keep a big social circle. Ever, that's his aunt, who Hector has asked me not to identify. You'll see why as we get deeper into the story. A good kid. I got no complaints about him. He was the best son Monica asked for one. Very polite,

very well mannered. Hector's a big guy. He's six too, and on this morning he was wearing a black hoodie under another black hoodie with a baseball hat. He pointed to a corner where a guy just got shot in the head the other week. But he says this area was a lot worse when he was growing up. Back in the days, they used to have little crack bottles. Seen those. I tried to google a quick picture for you.

But if there was that trend where there was a train where instead of start up putting the cracking bags away, now they just put the crack and crack bottles. I used to see that all over the place. That wasn't the only way Hector's life was intertwined with crime. His aunt, that same aunt he just heard from so heroin and

his dad was also involved in the drug business. So he was a guy that you would call if your drug dinner and someone knows your money and there's a problem, my father would come and beat you up, kidnap you're throwing in the back of the car or something. He's a sweetheart now, by the way, my father is a lovely gentleman. But back in the days, he was young and stupid. One day when he was a preteen, Hector's

aunt brought him a computer. She wanted me to do hold my homework and stuff and writer reports, so she bought me like at the time, it was like it was like the Model. It was like the super computer, his super desktop. It was it was a sony vile. I had like sixteen megabytes of RAM they had, like had a Pennium on sixty six chip it in had a twenty eight point eight upgraded came over him, Um, it was like a Cadillac. Hector sounds super excited here, but when his aunt first gave him this computer, he

really didn't take an interest. He was busy playing outside with his friends, and the computer got stored in a closet. Everyone forgot about it. Shortly after this, Hector's life took a dramatic turn. My aunts and my father were arrested, and you know, the cops came and arrested my grandmother in our apartment. So I was there with the cops game. They pulled up to the door and they let me and my brother go with nowhere to go. Hector, thirteen years old at the time, stood out on the streets

until the sun rose. Then he got passed around the homes of a couple of relatives until his grandmother got released on bail and took him back to the sixth floor apartment in the Lower East Side. The police had ransacked the place once everybody was gone, and we threw everything out. I'm going to the close in the moment, there's a massive sony vital box there this time, eager

for an escape, Hector took an interest. It's like you don't wine the first time, and it's like you got mail a well, um, but I had like a Copey serve, trial copy cercles, another service similars a well, and I'm just gonn online and I'm just talking to people. At first, I thought the world fake, right, I thought they were like robots or something. Just can't be real, the chat bots. I started cursing people out as a thirteen real kid. I mean, you know, my insults were childish, and uh,

people started crushing me back. I was like, wow, there's either some really sophisticating pots or these are real people. When Hector's aunt gave him the computer, she had one warning because of the way our minds run in my family. The only thing my words to him more when I gave him that computer, word, this is a federal offense. Whatever you do, don't do nothing criminal wan, which is excellent advice. But with his aunt and dad in prison,

Packtor and his grandmother had very little money. Who was just meeting her surviving off like a boat six months as a side check. So it was a tough situation and I needed to find way to get a line for free. Hector came up with an ingenious and illegal solution. He would use other people's a o L accounts to get online, either by guessing their passwords or even by pretending to be an AOL employee to trick users and

handing over their personal information. You know what they say, like marijuana is a gateway drug, well pastor cracking is another gateway drug. I think a lot of us remember that moment when we first got dial up internet at home and the things that made the Internet feel a little magical. Oh. Absolutely. I remember the first time I was in university talking with my high school friends that

were at different colleges around the world. Old and the idea of just communicating with them online seemed, you know, completely amazing. Yeah, you know. For me, and I'm just a couple of years younger than Hector, chatting with my friends on a well instant messenger was my thing. But for Hector, the Internet was a different kind of toy,

vast library that he could just get lost in. I would wake up in the morning before school, before I quit school, and I was just gonna liine and just read I'll go to out of Vista dot com because Google wasn't that big yet, so he had out of East. You had exite. So I'll just type in how to hack or Unix or systems administration or whatever. I'll just sit there read manuals. That was just reading and reading

and reading and reading. And then at some point I broke into my first system without pastwards, without anything like that, and it was a Japanese university server. What was the purpose of breaking into that server? So proof a concept? Can I do it? And then they became my my my test bet right, and I learned so much of that system. We should be clear. Hacking into a university server is definitely a crime, but Hector is still an

early teen at this point. Like he loved that there was something new that he could focus on and get away from the world we was in when he was sixteen. Hector's hacking morphed into something different, something more politically charged. At the time, in the year two thousand, Puerto Ricans were protesting the U. S. Navy for conducting bombing practice on the island of Yekes, the exercises that accidentally killed

a civilian there. Hector, who remembers of Puerto Rican descent joined the protests online by hacking into a Puerto Rican government server and defacing its website. Sooner after, when Hector's grandma was watching TV coverage of the protests, she heard something odd. They kept referring to a person called Sabu, the online pseudonym that Hector it started going by. The name was a reference to a particularly vicious wrestler, and

she knew that I was calling myself Sabu. So she came to me and she was like, what are you doing. What's your name? I said, Look, man, I don't know. You know, I'm in a way. I'm I'm a rebel trying to be a rebel. Okay, I'm trying to be checking Vara. You know, my mother's fear was that they were retaliated, come come looking for him. You know, that was always a fear of everything. She tried to give

me a fline. She would like, disconnect the computer. I was sleeping, and because I never saved anything, Hector didn't listen. And his aunt, who is probably the only other person who could have stopped him, was still in prison trying to avoid getting into any more trouble herself. So every time he came to talk to me, I was like, I don't want to know please, I don't want to know us because the only person I have told him that was his adrenal room. Shortainly after the Vikes hack

in the ninth grade, Hector dropped out of school. He said he was depressed, missing his dad and his aunt who were still in prison, living under financial strain, and as he got more isolated in the real world, Hector sought a community online. One day, he was approached by the guy who ran the underground hacker group Hackwiser. He was really cool, probably one of the coolest people have ever met on the Internet. And he's like, yeah, Sabo, Like I wanting to participate, and you know, we got

some stuff coming up soon after. This happened late Saturday night in Washington Sunday morning in China. A United States Enable Maritime Patrol aircraft on a routine surveillance mission in international airspace over the South China Sea collided with one of two Chinese fighters that were shadowing our plane. Both

our aircraft and a Chinese aircraft. The collision killed the Chinese pilot and the American plane was forced to make an emergency landing, the Chinese government refused to release the

plane's American crew until President George Bush apologized. The showdown led to a bizarre skirmish where Chinese hackers hacked US government websites and left politically charged messages on them, and so all they got all the US hackers were like, all right, we gotta do something too, We have to we have to fight back, and uh, we just learted hacking the out of Chinese government websites. So you're kind of like a rogue cyber warrior basically for the United States.

A few years later, in two thousand two, Hector's aunt and dad were released from prison. With his family back, Hector's life came to resemble something much closer to the

lives of other teenagers his age. He started taking more time away from the computer, attending protests in real life on the streets where he met student activists at the local universities, just hanging out with him at mcsorley's over there, and you know by Saint Mark's and um, just hanging out the bars in the back, just drinking and talking about politics. He even got legit jobs as a system administrator, which is essentially like an I t guy, and that

was a different person. You know, I was just working and living life. I would still dabble here and there. It is in order for you to to maintain your experience and skills, you obviously have to continue, right, But I wasn't doing act of his operations like I used to it. During his pause on his high profile hacks, Hector helped start a computer security firm with a Swedish business partner. They secured some clients in the Nordic region,

but the business folded shortly after. Then he got a job at a nonprofit earning a hundred thousand dollar salary. But life was about to get a lot tough. That's coming up. Welcome back. We left her story with things looking up for Hector, but by the late two thousand's, Hector's grandma was sick with the worsening case of diabetes. She could barely get out of bed. Hector was her caretaker. Meanwhile, Hector's aunt had gone back to dealing heroin. In two

thousand nine, she got arrested again. She had two young daughters who were three and five years old, and with his aunt gun, it was up to Hector to raise the girls. Did you feel ready for that responsibility to become a father. Over night us insane. By the spring of two thousand ten, between taking care of the girls and taking care of his grandmother, Hector couldn't make a normal office job work. He lost his job at the nonpro off it, and then he lost his grandmother. He

was twenty six at the time. Her dying is just like I couldn't even cry. I was just like, wow, I can't believe in why this, Why me? Where is she gone? But then you had to come to the realization, dude's been sick for ten years. I was there at home with the kids. We were as low as possible. Trust me when I tell you were really, really low. Um that's the lowest ever been because I had the girls. But then what times I was scared, I couldn't be

I couldn't feed them. You know that's why spiral. Yeah, yeah, that's when I really lost it and I just started hacking the planet man m Some of Hector's hacks came out of these destitute times. On a few occasions, he hacked a company that sold auto parts. So, for example, someone didn't order for a car motor and the destination was Connecticut I would change the destination to a location in New York, and I would pick up the motor and and I sold them and just bold the kids

food and both crayons and coloring books. But most of Hector's hacks were far more ambitious in their scope. And those hacks were sparked by a video that Wiki Leaks published online in April two five and individuals Roger that so the views from a US Army helicopter, and you can see the gun's cross hairs in the middle of the frame. You hear the American soldiers aboard discussing the group of men they see below. All right, we got a guy with an rpgre walking and the helicopter who

starts praying them with bullets. Pretty graphic. You're seeing arms, heads ripped off. You're like, damn, it's pretty tough. But this guy's gotta be terrorists. Two of the people who are shot for journalists with the news agency Reuters. US soldiers mistook their camera equipment for weapons. The video sparked public outrage, it became a rallying cry for the hacker group Anonymous, and it reignited something within Hector. It really

bothered me because here in New York growing up. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk too bad about the NYPD, but I've seen stuff these cops have done. I guess people in authority, right, they have a gun, they feel like they have the authority to shoot first, ask questions later. And you had no idea if the guys with journalists or not. And he just shot him. And but you don't really killed me. Watching the ambulance, right, you saw

the guy with the van. He tried to swop people who that were still alive come on and make his blew them up with his kids. I mean, that was tough to watch. Claire. With the renewed drive to act, Hector wanted to do something, and he went on a hunt to join Anonymous, which was gaining notoriety at the time. He watched the YouTube videos posted by the group, which took him to the website for Chan, where he found

the links to join Anonymous. Is online chat forums on i r C, which stands for Internet Relay Chat right. The i r C was sort of an Internet wide bulletin board. You can almost think of it like a big version of Slack where you can join individual channels. De voted to different topics, and this is where he found the Hackers channel. And Hector got approached by a guy who went by the handle T Flow. Yes, Hector,

if you wanted to join a secretive hacker club. Hector said yes, So Andy invite me to have grew a room called Internet Fats, and Internet Fairs was full of like all the big names, so anonymous. At the time, it was deep place to be in. Earlier we heard Hector talk about hacking the planet. You can take that pretty literally. I've done a lot of hacks. I've I've done thousands of hacks. I've done hacks so big that

you will never know. I can never discuss it. But out of out of everything that you know and with the media knows, with the public knows, one of the bigger hacks is average spring stuff. This he's referring to is the Tunisian uprising of eleven, which went on to spark similar protests across the Arab world. The people's protests are in no way cooling down, even as the politicians agreed on plans for a coalition government including the opposition. I don't want other is berracious were but I saw

the Tunisian situation as something that could change history. They could probably cause a chain reaction in the Middle East and get rid of a lot of the dictators that were there. And I thought, you know what, I could probably help these people. So Hector and a number of Anonymous hackers attacked the Tunisian government's network, disrupting officials email

and defacing the Prime Minister's website. Hector joined similar attacks on other authoritarian regimes, including the governments of Algeria, Yemen, and Zimbabwe. And then there were Anonymous as less worldly hacks. The group punished companies that had shunned wiki leaks. For example, when PayPal, Visa and master Cards started blocking donations to wiki leaks, the Anonymous hackers slowed or knocked offline their websites. But perhaps the group's most brazen attack during this time

was an act of revenge. It was against the guy called Aaron Bar. He was the CEO of HB Gary Federal Now HB Gary is a cyber security firm that offers protection to corporations and governments from cyber attack. Bar threatened Anonymous by telling The Financial Times he had collected information on their core leaders, including many of their real names. The response was swift. Anonymous took down their website, stole thousands of emails and posted them on the internet. The

CEO resigned. I remember this story. Aaron Barr's boss got a lot of attention. It was it was just the hubrist of it all, and then of course it all came back to bite him. I even remember writing a Business Week article about it at the time. Yeah, what made the hack extra risky wasn't just the publicity it generated. Hector and I talked about this over lunch at a diner where he'd order these big breakfasts to wind down

after an all night hacking spree. I was like, Wow, I really lost the boundary, Like I really went too far. The HP guy was a federal contractor, that's a core US asset. UM, and you like had the girls at that point, right, so like, but you didn't think, like, wow, I should really stop before I get so I got the kids, I was already involved in other hacking operations. It was just so late. I could have slowed it down.

You're right, and that's definitely mistake. That's definitely something that I admit, Like I could have stopped, um, I would have got arrested. Either way, but I could at least stopped and maybe lessen the blow. Um, but I was I was at the point, at least I felt like I was at the point of no return. And uh, sometimes you know, agatting part of my language, because sometimes you have a moment. Right as this was all going down, his aunt was still in prison. One time, Hector visited

with her daughters and his friends. The friend that accompanied him up to that visit told me, you need to hurry up and come home. There's a lot of things going on that I can't tell you. And having him tell me that was enough for me to be like,

what could possibly be going on? And then I was getting little bits and pieces like from my aunts that they would try to meet up with him or see my daughters or something, and there's a bad We don't know what Pop is doing, but you know something's not right, but nobody could tell me specifically what it was. In May two thleven, Hector embarked on what would be his final hacking spring. It was a situation where the last of us, the last of the Internet fens, we were

in a room by ourselves. We had survived a whole bunch of drama and arguing and fighting. So it was just a six which was me um Kayla, t Flow, Topiary, pone Source, and Ava Unit. They called themselves low Seck lowsper laughs SEC for security. There's a group of young guys making fun of the cybersecurity industry. Each day they hacked the different entity companies like Sony Pictures, PBS, Nintendo,

And they didn't do it quietly. They published press releases to take credit for the attacks, and in the day they dubbed f FBI Friday. You can just imagine what that first F stands for. Low Sec even hacked the Atlanta chapter of an organization affiliated with the FBI called Infra Guard. The hackers stole and released logging credentials, passwords,

and other confidential information. They also defaced the chapter's website, posting a YouTube video with words above it that said, in all caps, let it flow, you stupid FBI battleships. But once I did defacement and people started commenting on it, what ended up getting more comments about how I'm going down in the worst possible way. They're gonna get you now, like you you really screwed up. You're gonna found out that infant guard was really deeply embedded into the FBI.

And so over the next few days, I was paranoid. I wiped my laptop. I sat there playing with the kids, and every day I will take him to church, and uh, you know, I started seeing con Edison trucks parked out from in front of my own building. It was just bizarre people hiding in vans with paperwork peeking at me. It was a balmy evening. On June seven eleven, exactly one year after his grandmother's death, Hector went to a local right aid, bought the girls coloring books and toys,

and dropped them off at church. He wanted to get them out of the apartment, the same apartment where a decade and a half earlier, he once watched the cops holloway his grandmother. He says, he sensed what was about to happen next, and then they said police, said police, what the police don't here. When opened the door, I see the whole FBI squad just in there. They said, come on, step out of the door. At the door was Chris Tarbell, a young special agent, and the FBI's

elite cyber squad. A handful of other agents were there. Too. One of them said, we know you are dude, I know you're sad, but I'm like, well, I don't know who that is. And I knew it Any really had me um, but I was trying to burn some time, trying to figure out what could with these kids. With his aunt in prison his grandmother dead, Pector was a sole guardian of his young cousins. More than anything else, he worried about the FBI calling child services. These little girls.

I cannot allow them to go into forced to care. I got to do everything in my power to make sure they stay with me because and my new We're told about a split second. But for that split second, and my brain was like a week. He didn't know what to do, so Hector let the agents into his apartment. They sat around his kitchen table. Hector stalled them, continuing to deny that he was Sabu. So the agents brought up some damning evidence they'd uncovered through a search warrant

for his Facebook account. On Facebook, Hector had sent a relative a list of other people's credit card numbers that he'd obtained. That's a serious crime, and it was enough for the FBI to arrest him. But the agents wanted something more, and when he said, how about you just come downtown, you know, let's figure this out together. I knew I had leverage as something. I said, all right, I'll do that. We're gonna eat the kids here with my brother and um, Chris Tarbell, he's all over an

FBI just I can actually mention his name. He was a gentleman. He said, okay, he's going to leave the kids here with your brother, and you're gonna come down with us. Who would have figured this out. The agents arrested Hector and right around midnight took him to the FBI's office at twenty six Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. At the FBI's office, Hector didn't even asked for a lawyer.

He was still terrified of losing custody of his young cousins and he wanted to make every show of cooperating. When I got downtown, I said, look, here's what I know. Exploits zero days um attack methodology. I know how anonymous works, and it works really bad. It's not sophisticated. Trust me, Um, I'm the most sophisticated hacker there. Look at me, Um, you know high school dropout, right, So Uh, but they

were more curious about, like how these centralized organizations work. UM. They were really curious if I was really decentralized, which I've told you no, they're not what they weren't. Um. They were curious about how we're doing these fast paced, UM sophisticated hacks or high profile hacks. And I explained to them it was easy. I did most of them. And that's when they hit me. And he said, okay, well you admitted these times were gonna have to charge

you with these climes. Uh so I do you had that? I was a gunner. I was dead, you know, I was done. But Hector had a lifeline. How we avoided a one twenty four year prison sentence and its long road to redemption that's coming in part two of this episode. If you subscribe to our show, it's already in your feet.