Darknet Diaries - 78: Nerdcore

Episode Date: November 10, 2020

Nerdcore music is music for nerds. In this episode we hear from some of the musicians who make Nerdcore music.This episode features guests ytcracker, Ohm-I, and Dual Core.Content warning: This episode has explicit lyrics.MusicFor a playlist of music used in this episode visit darknetdiaries.com/episode/78.SponsorsSupport for this show comes from IT Pro TV. Get 65 hours of free training by visiting ITPro.tv/darknet. And use promo code DARKNET25.Support for this show comes from Blinkist. They offer thousands of condensed non-fiction books, so you can get through books in about 15 minutes. Check out Blinkist.com/DARKNET to start your 7 day free trial and get 25% off when you sign up.

Hey, this has been a weird year, hasn't it? Well, this is going to be a weird episode. Are you ready to go on a musical adventure with me? Yeah? Okay. Let's do this. Here, check this out. Did, uh, did you just hear what I heard? Pass the hash? Trojan all the firmware? What is this? Man in the middle?

My wiretaps are feared? Was this song made just for me? Okay, okay, okay. I'm hooked and I want to hear more. And if you do too, come along with me and let's dive into the world of nerdcore music. But two quick warnings. First, this episode has explicit lyrics. Lots of swear words and stuff.

Second, make sure to listen to this at 1x speed, okay? Alright, now turn it up. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Darknet Diaries. This episode is sponsored by Delete Me. I know a bit too much about how scam callers work. They'll use anything they can find about you online to try to get at your money.

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to help keep businesses secure. I know a few people who work over there, and I can vouch they do very good work. If you want to improve the security of your organization, give them a call. I'm sure they can help. But the founder of the company, John Strand, is a teacher, and he's made it a mission

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and find links to their webcasts to get some world-class training. That's BlackHillsInfosec.com. BlackHillsInfosec.com. Okay, first on the playlist is Whitey Cracker. This is DJ MC Whitey Cracker. And that's spelled with the letter Y, the letter T, and then Cracker. Now, to give you a taste of what Whitey Cracker's music sounds like, here's an appetizer. You hear all this?

Living like the archetypal internet kingpin. Traffic on the scanner's been shallow, so I'm in a shadow. And then he says, fingers on the keyboard, typing, showing my leetness. I guess that sort of frames my curiosity. How leet are nerdcore rappers? Who is Whitey Cracker? To find that out, we have to stop and rewind the tape to when he was a kid. He grew up in California and in Colorado and was introduced into tech by his father.

He worked for Hughes Aircraft and he was working on like Peacekeeper missiles, just all the Cold War cool stuff, but absolutely hated California. This is Whitey Cracker talking. So moved back to Colorado and he was working with Martin Marietta, which became Lockheed Martin. He's very much hardware oriented and I kind of fell more into the software field,

but it was lucky to have a computer in my house kind of when they weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. So that was really an advantage, I think. The first time I ever touched a computer, I was just super fascinated with them. So I just wanted to figure out how they work. We're talking the 90s here, when Whitey Cracker

was in high school. And he was getting online then and looking to see what was there, which, by the way, there wasn't much online at the time. I was really into the bulletin board scene locally. And I think from there is kind of where I started reading a lot of texts, text files, ziggzines, and sort of the tales of the underground. And I got real fascinated with phone phreaking and hacking and stuff, sort of being like a natural extension to the understanding of how computers worked.

The internet and computers were fascinating to him. So he kept going deeper and deeper to learn more about it. My first real hack, I think there was a public library had like a bulletin board system. And I found out how to like drop into a shell and I turned it into an egg drop bot. At that time, most people didn't have a persistent connection to the Internet, but his library did. So he installed an IRC bot on it, which could act sort of like an admin of chat room something that was always vigilant watching everything that was going on this was cool as a teenager to have remote control over an always-on computer and to actually put it to use uh yeah i

just kind of really got addicted to the like the real breaking in the stuff. So I just kind of went on this little bit of a, like a rampage, I guess, after that. But I hacked pretty much every school district in the state. Now, before we get too far down his hacking path, at this same time, he was also learning how to make music on his computer. Oh, and just so you know, all the songs you hear while we're talking with Whitey Cracker were made by him. In the 90s, there were these programs called trackers, which would let you play samples at different pitches to make music. Like Screen Tracker was the first one that I had used.

And actually a couple of the computer guys that I, you know, the other hacker dudes were super into electronic music. Here's one of the songs he made while in high school using Scream Tracker. What do you think about Whitey Cracker? I think I would like to fuck him. You know, I wasn't going to say anything, but that intro brings back memories

I totally forgot about. When I was a teenager around that same time, I found some text-to-speech software. Whatever I wrote, the computer would try to say it. You could do male voices or female voices, British or American accents. And when I discovered this as a teenager, I made the voice say sexy things too. And possibly all teenage boys who discover text-to-speech programs for the first time get the computer to say something dirty just to giggle. At this time in the 90s, the cool place to be part of was the demo scene, and Whitey Cracker was right in the middle of it.

The demo scene was its own subculture of the internet. It pretty much was just an audio and visual showcase made by independent artists. Demos were little programs, executables, that when you ran it, it would just display moving graphics and play music. That's all it did. But in the 90s, it was really cool to scroll through scene.org, download files, and run them to see what they did. Since Whitey Cracker was making music, he was all about the demo scene, uploading his music there and making friends with other electronic musicians. I looked on scene.org and I can't find a lot of the older stuff that I had. It was definitely on bulletin boards, but we had this group called the Putang Clan. We had one called

Multi Sync. And then there was a group called Category 5. So at this point, Whitey Cracker was really into computers, using them to make music with other people and to hack stuff too. And being part of the demo scene sometimes blended right into the hacker scene, because a lot of apps that were used to play pirated games had cool little graphics and music built into the app to say, this game was cracked by our hacker group, which made the hacker group so much cooler. I remember when Nuke had come out, and it was like, you send out a band packet to port 139 and it would crash someone's computer.

If you, you know, this is prior to like consumer firewalls and everything like that. So it's like, basically, basically you had somebody's IP address and they had a Windows machine. You could invariably crash them. And I remember having that and one of the sysops at the Southern BBS I had gone in and he's like, have you ever been on AOL? And I hadn't, but like I'm obviously aware of it.

But he'd be like, you can like just knock people offline there all the time too. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. Yeah, so America Online, or AOL, was a way to get online in the 90s, but it was designed for dummies to use the internet. And so because it was so super easy to use, it attracted a lot of newbies to the internet. And in some IRC chat rooms, this meant AOL users were easy targets to try to hack. Whitey Cracker was finding ways to hack into AOL servers and look up information on their users.

Don't fuck with the Whitey Cracker. We were working on defacing keywords and we had access to the CRIS, which is a consumer resource information service. On AOL, you like look people up and get their credit card information their address phone number you know just all the notes on the account so really like it was crazy because back then when people were actually anonymous on the internet and weren't trying to uh like you know put all their real information in facebook and stuff it was really just funny because he'd be talking a shit to

somebody on, you know, AOL and then tell them where they live. And you wouldn't see him sign on for weeks because they'd just be scared of their minds. Now, all this was going on while Whitey Cracker was still in high school. And he's also hacking into the school because why not? Right. I mean, for a teenager, it's sometimes just a simple question of let's see if the school, which is trying to teach me about computers, knows anything about how to secure their own network. So he was able to get into the school's database, which allowed him to change grades for any student in the school. I just had the perception, basically, that if you change one grade in a system, then it's obviously easy to find out who is behind it and stuff. So there was kind of a method to changing, you know, random grades and stuff. So there's no way

to like really associate it with anybody. So you changed your own grade? I didn't change my own grades. No, never changed my own grades. You just screwed with other students. Change others. Yeah. That's the, uh, that's the best way to do it. I'd basically gotten to all the record systems, and I'd defaced all the webpages later. Defacing a website is pretty much just making changes to a website when you're not supposed to be able to. I'd replace the entire front page. So it's like all you'd have to do is go to the domain and you would see it there. I would leave links to the original pages and stuff. But yeah, just replacing the entirety of the page.

Sometimes I would mess with the, you know, just take the existing page that's there and just mess with the text to make it funny. And edit the pictures. And sometimes replace it completely. But again, I think it was a competitive atmosphere that, again, amongst ourselves, we were just trying to find the biggest fish in prime. And so he was gaining street cred as a hacker, earning the respect of more people in the chat rooms that he was in.

I started getting into, I was really into hip hop and everything, so graffiti was one of the elements of hip-hop, I guess. And so I kind of really liked web page defacement. That seemed to be the most hip-hop of all the hacks you could do. So I remember the first kind of series. There was a ColdFusion um when it was a default upload uh there was a it was like in the examples of the cold fusion server but some people would just

leave this directory up there and it allowed you to arbitrarily upload files to uh to web pages so i remember just grinding out like local car dealerships um just web pages i'd see on tv like um again this was back in the late 90s and early 2000s so it wasn't like most people had aol keywords uh back then which was like how you would visit them on the internet since so many people were on aol so that like i said defacing keywords and defacing webpages just became kind of this sort of funny way to use the hacking, but not. There was glory in it, I guess. You're not sealing nuclear secrets, though. This was fun.

This was a rush for him. Making music and defacing websites became his two biggest hobbies. First, it was like high value target type stuff, corporate. And then for whatever reason, it was just like the Mills and the Govs just became sort of enticing

shiny Pokemon to me. Mills and Govs? Those are top level domains. He's talking about any website that ends in.mil or.gov. So he's targeting military and government websites now. Some of the ways he got in were pretty simple too. He just had a handful of techniques and he would try each technique to see if it worked. These were sometimes simple tools just to check if the web server was vulnerable, and if so, he'd exploit it.

I did, yeah, the city of Colorado Springs, like, so my local town, and I hacked, like, the USGS, Texas Department of Public Safety, so it's, like, their sheriff's department. I did, like, AT&T, Acer, the FAA, New York Department of Agriculture,

Oregon State Construction Contractors Board, the Oregon State Board of Education, pretty much every school district in Colorado, the Goddard Spice Flight Center International Program, National Training Center for the Bureau of Land Management. Yeah, it was fun. But again, my purpose was just maybe like graffiti.

I wasn't really trying to disrupt the inner workings of the U.S. government at the time. So at this point, are you feeling like you're going to get caught? I was fairly certain like because the handle that i went by like the whitey cracker or whatever that people just they knew me as that anyway like because i had done music under it and stuff so it wasn't like kind of a secret but and that's part of where you know i i didn't delete logs like i, I purposely, like, I was just making it so. I didn't really think about the consequences, though, at that time. Like, I wasn't really, you know, I wasn't 18,

so I figured anything that happened to me, I could just get adjudicated out of or whatever. At this point, Whitey Cracker discovered a pretty interesting thing that could potentially earn him money. He found some websites had referral programs. Basically, the website would pay anyone cash for referring a new user to the site. So Whitey Cracker realized, hey, if I had a lot of email addresses, I could send them all an email telling them to go sign up at this website, and I'd get paid for sending people there. So he entered into the world of spam.

Step one, though, is getting the email addresses. Okay, so on AOL, there's a member directory, but then there's also a bunch of chat rooms. And in the chat rooms, there's a feature you can click called Who's Online, and it would list who was in that room at the time. And the max room size is about 23, 24 people. So there was just programs. It'll just automatically go through and click.

So to gather the names, pretty much, you know, you just go to all the public rooms and you would cycle through. And there wasn't, initially there wasn't all the public rooms and you would cycle through. And there wasn't initially there wasn't any rate limits. So you could just basically get the entirety of AOL and just have something that's constantly running and grabbing names from the member directory. So you can take a dictionary file and then search for certain things that would be in people's profiles. And you would just scale out that way.

So you've got what a list of like a few hundred a few thousand millions okay step one is done he has millions of email addresses next is to find the most profitable website that pays for referrals but doesn't mind if people use spam to get those referrals so after researching what websites to promote, he found the perfect site. So porn was pretty much the, I wasn't even old enough really to view it, but a lot of these companies, they outwardly had a policy against spamming, but realistically under the hood, everybody knew. It was just kind of known you know this is like how the traffic gets generated so there was choices to get paid per click or per sign up so

depending on how your traffic backed out you know in spam obviously it's just uh you want to go the pay-per-click model you newbies cannot stomach what comes with fucking spam homie believe that playboy you know me i don't need no introduction and shit spamming around the whole city pressing buttons you bitch on banging mouse dangling just spamming and shit stay on top spam my box stay mailing ya bitch why that cracker get it right

don't tangle and twist it hit town square every night drunk drinking that chrissy spammers man don't like it cause I'm so there he goes sending millions of emails to people urging them to visit porn sites and to join as a member. And the more people he got to click, the more money he'd make. So you were making $1,000 a week? Yeah, just about.

That's pretty good for a 17-year-old. Yeah, it was amazing. Do you remember things you were buying as a 17-year-old? I mean, lots of computer equipment. My wardrobe was insane. I had just the most insane. Echo was my favorite clothing brand and i pretty much had every piece that they owned but you know i was taking my friends out to dinner and everything all the time bought a car like i don't know just uh whatever you know like again

it was just would your parents think that you had how did how'd you get this money um i mean they knew uh but like my dad was always just really my parents are really traditional and i was kind of at that point fucking education and stuff i wasn't i i had understood i realized that i make more than my teachers you know not, not doing even, not even really working, you know, and there's sort of this whole kind of teenage rebellion thing where, you know, every teenager does think that they know everything. But at that stage, I was really like, well, if this is like what's possible, then why do I need to continue to do this type of stuff? So yeah, I think my parents, you know, my dad was trying to instill like work ethic in me, you know, going to work and showing up and this type of stuff.

It's not, and I was like, no, it's the money that's important. It's not the job. It's the byproduct, the end result of what you're working for is the, you know, the key here. So we were at odds, I guess, philosophically. There's a little place in my dreams where I go and I want to cheer up at scenes. No filters and no limitations to stop me from spamming and paper chasing. Sending me emails, not one complaint.

See, show right away and there isn't a way. AOL doesn't sue anybody because they consider spamming a hobby everyone buys and no one jumps and there aren't any anti-spammer punks the post where you live on rock so because you live in a land where the cocks grow everybody has somewhere around here Whitey Cracker dropped out of high school which I understand he's running circles around school's network, so there's probably not much they can teach him about computers. And he's making more money than his teachers. He's feeling like he's got life figured out. Cybercrime seems to be how some people, particularly juveniles, feel important. For Whitey Cracker, a 17-year-old dropout, this meant compromising and defacing multiple websites.

Kids like us, you know, we go out every day, we have fun, and we come home and rule the world. He came to the attention of DCIS when he illegally accessed a defense contract management agency web server. Once inside, he replaced DCMA information with text and graphics in which he bragged about his exploits. The pattern was repeated on over 40 websites, including servers maintained by NASA. Agents from DCIS, NASA, as well as the FBI began to close in on the juvenile. Meanwhile, police in Colorado Springs were conducting their own investigation. They were tracking down an individual who had hacked into local school records. The minor responsible for the defacements was soon identified and agents began to build their case. Whitey Cracker knew they were on to it. Detective DeHart told me that they

had a 314 page case report on the whole thing and I was just like, that's huge. The 17 year old suspect eventually confessed to one count of computer crime under Colorado law. He was placed on two years probation and fined $24,000. I think it was that the ride was over type thing. I mean, the one pact that is still kind of, again, it was just sort of a gentleman's agreement, I would say, but they were just like, look, if you didn't fuck with the government, we probably wouldn't have even come after you. And I thought that was pretty interesting. Um, so I've just had this gentleman's agreement with the government ever since that I

just don't hack them. And ever since then, like, I mean, I've pretty much stayed out of the, I haven't been rated since. And it's not like I kept my nose the cleanest, but at the same time, that was the pretty much just the biggest, I guess, takeaway is that, you know, the government will really roll over you if they have infinite budget and infinite time if you humiliate them. But while he had a truce with government websites, he didn't see any problem with continuing with his spamming career. Spamming is life. I've realized that hacking is much more rewarding when you are making money doing it. So that was the, I guess, onus for a lot of it. Defacing things wasn't really profitable unless you're obviously defacing something and putting a link to your gas card. complaints just yesterday had to clean the abuse box out like a juice box by the new spot proxies

are hot so i get up on the script and i load another bot and shrink down the list like cock and i gotta make a drop man this biz ops hot man i just i think that uh again people have varying opinions on it it's one of those things that i think everybody wants to do or wishes they could do like regardless of how annoying it is well Well, I won't say everybody, but that, you know, even in today's culture, like, you know, people are just like, listen to my mixtape or, you know, check out my YouTube channel, like and subscribe, that type stuff that really like getting, you know, into a million, 10 million, a hundred million inboxes. If you can do that and get that many eyeballs on your thing, like you're obviously doing pretty well.

At some point, he realized online pharmacies were also paying very well for referrals. And so he started sending spam, trying to get people to buy medications from certain pharmacies. Then he also found sites that you could buy fake diplomas from, and they were also paying well for referrals. If you send me another fucking text message to my cell phone, we're going to have a problem. Better knock this shit off. We've blasted this diploma spam.

He actually figured out a way to send a bunch of spam through text messages in some campaigns. I will sue you for every fucking thing you got. Do not call or text my phone again. And then so a lot of the calls that are on that song are actually people that were spammed and didn't want diplomas. You might be wondering, isn't all this illegal? Well, yeah, now it is. The CanSpam Act was enacted in 2003, which was right around this time. CANSPAM is an acronym and stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing. Yeah, after that came out, some spammers took a big hit, going to prison and getting hit with millions of dollars in fines. Whitey Cracker had to learn how to keep low and out of trouble while continuing to spam. Because honestly, major corporations spam us all day long.

And they do it legally. So it's just a matter of making smart business choices. And with his years of background in doing all this, he was really good at it. And he was even able to legitimize the whole business, incorporating it and claiming it on his taxes and everything. I guess like kind of what broke me out uh more into quote-unquote serious musicianship or something was when I released NerdRap Entertainment System in 2005 um it got traction just on the

on the internet at large My masters and classes, headers I compiled and distribute Open source if you'd like to contribute Arrays on arrays, my stack holds a tribute To pushing and popping, XO and knocking Systematic file locking, my sequel knows no equal Index with my brain, got a million people Eagerly awaiting my macro advances Running with my beta cause I'm taking chances Increment, I do while others keep style Flavor to the nth, goes to the nth mile So while this album is called Nerd Rap Entertainment Systems,

it was another rapper who named the whole genre. So MC Frontalot, he came out with a song called Nerdcore Rising. This, like, the genre, like, right around, I would say 2006, 2007, started a really kind of game scheme. But Frontalot is credited with naming it. Realistically, like there's even within quote unquote nerdcore, there's all these like sub genres where, you know, Frontalot's like a graphic designer, you know, does web pages and stuff.

But, you know, obviously a lot, it's like a graphic designer, you know, it does web pages and stuff, but, you know, obviously highly nerdy. But, you know, his content is different than, you know, MC Lars, which is, he's a literature. He has a degree from Stanford in 19th century literature. So a lot of his rhymes are more centered around the poetry and prose of that era. Me, like I'd been doing music obviously prior to that but my stuff was i just it was kind of like this gangster rap for nerds type thing where i'm talking about you know hacking doing all this stuff uh criminal stuff on the computer and you know not outside in the

real world type thing but nerdcore sort of encompasses all of this sort of what we know we consider nerd culture, but I mean now has kind of become fused more in the mainstream as technologies kind of popped off a lot more. Yeah. Do you think that it's unfortunate it's called nerd core? Not entirely. Like I found it i've always found it kind of an

apt way to describe i've always been proud to kind of associate with the genre um and i'm considered like one of the kind of forefathers of it so Man, I'm a mastermind. Backhand, backgammon with a faster mind. Game theory. Yodel if my soul just hit me. So solid, you better metal gear me. Steady gamer. You're a lamer. Need a second life just to give you some fame, huh? Bottle champagne, hell, by the power.

Buy another one when the clock strikes the hour. Get drunk. So the nerdcore genre isn't always about hacking. There's a lot of nerdcore songs about video games, graphic design, programming, D&D, comic books, and sci-fi shows. Nerds cover a big range of topics, which means while I consider myself a nerd, I often run into nerds that I have no common interests with. We are not the same. Yeah, well, so this is part of where I got Nerd Life tattooed across my stomach. And it was like kind of a play on Thug Life

that Tupac had. But I got it on the seventh anniversary of his death, like when he was supposed to come back. It was like september 13 2003 but if you looked at like older interviews of tupac and stuff before he'd kind of gone really hard like he was super into drama and you know he was like kind of like effeminate and you can just sort of see this like that even to people can be nerdy about anything i guess is the biggest like takeaway and

like you said i i think that's a more of a beautiful way to communicate it that you know again just like people aren't you know if this guy's into comics and you know you're into this some people are sports nerds some people know like you know everything about this baseball player that basketball player or something and it it's just, I think the accumulation of knowledge is more like what I kind of identify with and like what I say that nerd life is. And it's just being passionate about something to some crazy large degree. Mine just happens to be computers. So Whitey Cracker's music career has been pretty successful.

He's been able to do international tours with his music and play tons of live shows every year. I get probably five, six fan mails a day that are just, you know, like, I got into computer security because of you, or I listen to your music all the time like long coding or you know whatever and that to me is just i just teach like teaching through music or getting people like inspired that way is a lot like that's where i kind of feel the success comes in is that you know my fans by and large, are all relatively smart

and, again, passionate. You kind of have to be to be a fan. Whereas if you're a Drake fan, nothing against Drake, but this cross-section is way different. I wouldn't say that Drake inspires people to code or something, so it's a little bit different but um like you know do you know dead mouses yeah yeah so uh he's uh he actually plucked anti-sec out of the weeds and he uh he's been playing it out now but um we're re-releasing it on Mousetrap, his remix.

So it's kind of, I guess, going mainstream in a sense where, I mean, Deadmau5 is putting it on his album and stuff. So there's a little bit of that. I mean, still is happening to this day. Okay, so yeah. Whitey Cracker made this song called Anti-Seg. Here, take a listen. I'm the de facto leader of a movement Screaming hack the planet back in 99 Seacracker made this song called Antisag. Here, take a listen. and seizing my equipment. Blocking all my shipments, sitting on they hit list.

Old day radical, emphatic beat, haddock in the stab hit. I envelope the game, call me rabbit. So this is a song about LulzSec, which I'll have to do a future episode on sometime. But basically, Operation Anti-Sec

was a hacking campaign conducted by a group of anonymous hackers called LulzSec. And they hacked into a ton of websites, including Sony, PBS, the U.S. Senate, and a bunch of other sites. The LulzSec kind of anonymous phenomenon, you know, I was involved in Project Chainology and some of the other stuff. But yeah, the scene right around that time was really booming. Huh. It sounds like Hugh was there watching what LulzSec was doing, and at least being present for some of the things they did. So since he had a front row seat and was watching it all go down,

and it was making major news, why not write a song about it? class c class it is evident we flousing iron cannon in the proxless deep dowsing lean back bitch we be sending an injection magic quotes off join table in a section put it up on pace then it won't get erased then 20 million hits take it down like another thing that whitey cracker got involved with along his journey was Bitcoin. One of the songs he's known for is this one called Bitcoin Baron. Bitcoin is currently worth something like $10,000 each right now. But when he got in, it was only like $50 per coin. So when Bitcoin was around like $60 or something, people were like, what do we do with this? You know, what can be done with this? And Jason was like, just, well, you know, I'll feed homeless people with it. So yeah, Whitey Cracker and Jason have fed over 200,000 people now through their Bitcoin

charity. Now, these days, Whitey Cracker holds a day job doing information security work. Currently, like, I'm working at Ring. Ring is an internet-connected camera that Amazon makes that goes on your front door. I'm part of Amazon Digital Security, but I work under, like, more for the Ring subsidiary. And there's a lot of considerations, like privacy and security there that obviously I want to make.

If I started a camera company tomorrow, I wouldn't have the reach and impact that Ring does. So as a utility, just being part of that pipeline and being able to affect the products the way that I would like to see them distributed is a real, like that's where I see the benefit of working with like a Google or a Facebook or an Amazon is that, again, you can be in the trenches and you can affect the change that you want to see in these devices and, you know, put your mark on them. This episode is sponsored by NetSuite. What does the future hold for business? You don't know? Me neither. But what I do know is that you don't have to be months ahead of your competitors to be more successful.

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insights and forecasting, allowing you the opportunity to look into the future with actionable data. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com. So what do you want to be known as? Oh, my. Yeah, that's fine. Oh, my. I like that because it's like the ohm as in the resistor.

I mean, that's where it came from. I would be current. Yeah, I's where it came from. I would be current. Yeah, I's current. All right, we got Omai up next. And I actually saw Omai live once at an after party for a security conference. Let's take a listen to his music. House nerd for life, yeah, I'll say it with pride. I don't worry about the haters while I'm staying inside.

I feel great with my internet connection. So don't hate on my internet connection. My life is the result of being deprived socially. Always forced to stay inside when I had hoped to be. Hanging out with friends at movies they wanted to go and see. And hopefully interacting with girls I wanted close to me. But I stayed indoors and watched TV. Growing up all alone, it was not easy.

And eventually I grew to love technology. Including the first laptop that someone got for me. It was a whole new world for me to escape in. I could emulate Game Boy Advance and PlayStation. I tried stolen Wi-Fi and it was amazing. TV episodes would load if I stayed patient. So did you steal Wi-Fi as a kid? Yeah, so growing up, we didn't have Wi-Fi. There was a router in the living room, but my room was not anywhere close to it.

So, one house around me that had their Wi-Fi open, and I would sit in my room and try to play games, or I would watch a lot of anime. That was you know, obviously I didn't know the legalities of it at the time

because I was young, but it was open, and I needed internet. It's true, isn't it? At least for me, that's all I needed growing up. So, Olai grew up in Brooklyn and his passion with computers started in junior high. I need to explain New York first, right? So the way the New York school system works is that once you reach the eighth grade, you get this big book of schools in New York. And there's a lot of schools in New York. And you have to apply for your schools that you want to go to. So when I was in junior high school, there was one school called Brooklyn Tech.

And I actually failed to get into that school because I didn't score high enough. But what happened was my, my music teachers in junior high school, they saw that they saw where I was, I was planning on going. And, um, someone put my name on a list of standby people, uh, to get into Brooklyn Tech and Brooklyn Tech is very technical heavy, right? So they had like an aerospace engineering major, like this high school had majors. That's how serious it was.

I was like, yeah, you know, I got a thing, you know, I got in and my major in high school was computer science. And so I took AP Java, computer architecture, like a prep for an A plus course, but like all these technical, like really in-depth courses, which I failed most of them because I stopped going to classes like halfway through. But that was my exposure, my initial exposure to most of the tech industry. I did pretty well. Like I did like the projects and stuff. I just didn't go to class half the time. Yeah. And then how were you into music at the time? So that was from junior high school when I was in band. I picked up alto saxophone, and I was playing that for a couple years.

And then when I got to high school, New York has what's called the Allstate Band. So there was Allstate Marching Band, Allstate Jazz Band. So I joined the Allstate marching band. And eventually I picked up like baritone saxophone and French horn and trombone. I was just playing all these instruments. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to go be a video game composer when I leave high school. And that didn't happen. But that was the goal at the time.

That makes me think. Are people who make music for video games also nerdcore musicians? I mean shoot some of the rappers here are taking video game sounds and putting them in their songs so maybe well Olai was really into video games and computers

at the time which he says in one of his songs sort of made him different let's say I'm not black because I'm a nerd that speaks with eloquence while pronouncing the entire word. But the whole idea of that is really quite absurd. So listen up for a bit and you might concur. I'm an educated man from Brooklyn. I'm a nerd, but there's no need to sink your hooks in and try to.

So, OK, the first thing I understand is that in a lot of Black neighborhoods, right, there's like an expectation, at least back in the 90s and maybe still now, you sort of fit in a certain way, right? So if you like certain things or if you talk a certain way, people will say, oh, you talk like you're white, right? You talk all proper, all that kind of stuff. And it was kind of one of those things that at the time, like I was just kind of like, I was like, oh, okay, sure. But it was like one of those things that kind of stuck with me because it made me feel like I didn't fit in at the time, especially going to a school like in Fort Greene, right, in Brooklyn, which now isn't as black as it used to be.

But it definitely got gentrified but um it it's it was one of those things just growing up it was what i was told by like other people right who look like me it was it was uh you're too white or you like white girls or something like that it was kind of like okay sure so if you walk around claiming that i'm more lame because i ain't into sports games you leaving me short change an individual no need to conform I'm more lame because I ain't into sports games, you're leaving me shortchanged. An individual, no need to conform, shame. It's my life, I ain't talking about the board games. You had no clue I could rap? Well, I'm not surprised.

Sorry for causing so much trouble when I rock the mic. I always shoot for the mic. And for whatever reason, there's always been this expectation that because I'm tall, that I play basketball. So I've never really gotten into playing sports. sports and never really cared too much to watch it. I get really annoyed when people put that expectation on me, like I'm supposed to know something. I joined the Navy and I left. I left New York and I was doing electronics. So I had my hands in a lot of deep network and radar electronic stuff. He spent years in the Navy doing this stuff. And he was thinking about getting out and doing something else. But then he saw a new opportunity.

The Navy has this role for cryptologic technicians for networks who do mostly the cyber fields for the Navy. And I was like, you know what? I'm gonna give this a shot. I'll stay in for four more years and see how it goes. He ended up spending 10 years in the Navy and then he got out of there and transitioned back to civilian life. I'm back.

It's the return of the home. It's the return of the home. Black hacker slash rapper, the return of the home. I'm settling for nothing less than usurping the throne. No matter if it's on computers or I'm heard on the phone. The observer of my tones and hoods and suburbia homes. Finished 10 years in the Navy drinking bourbon Patron. And I finished up my bachelor's while learning to pwn.

Nerd in the zone. Thought I was deserving a clone. Full-time job, full-time student. I emerged fully grown. Now I'm back in attendance. So when he got out of the Navy, he got a job as a penetration tester. I ain't scanning networks for practice. Checking your ports. I am scanning for access. Enumerating services. Better apply your patches. I'll search voice.

X-Way DB knows what the hack is. Yo, you need to fortify heavily. I see your database services in version 1 SMB. You know what this nerd gon' do. Gallows on my turn on you. This quad fool will make you sad forever. That's eternal blow. Dumping ashes when I'm loading up that Mimi cat. Crets to my boy my boy john see how many he can crack smash and i grab on that lateral path fake moving

blunts when i say that i'm passing a hash not a script kitty they ain't the level i'm on i'm a snake charmer watch me dance around some python and generate shell cool for surfaces i find on your network pop a shell like it right on So when I was a web app pen tester, and as I was doing this pen test for whatever site it was, they had ASP. And I was like, oh, what can I do with this? He decided to write his own tool to give him command line access to this machine. And so like being able to take over an entire box,

to me, it was like super exciting. So I did it. And like being able to take over an entire box. To me, it was like super exciting. So I did it. And like being able to take over an entire box just to a web shell and like writing.NET payloads and all these other cool things that people were doing that I was just kind of like, oh, you're doing cool research in .NET. Let me go figure out how to write this web shop. It was definitely an experience. It was like one of my favorite experiences from that job. I wrote that song specifically for my resume. Because I knew that getting out the Navy, getting a job was going to be a little hard.

And I had some experiences with some companies who explicitly mentioned that they had a hard time hiring veterans because of personality issues and personality conflicts. But I just wanted to do something unique for my resume. And so I just left the link to the song at the bottom of the footer. I was like, yeah, check out this song. Like, hire me, please. Please. Well, how did it work?

It didn't. So the companies that interviewed me, the song aside, I just didn't get hired. So I already knew it was going to be an uphill battle. Did they comment at all on like, oh, cool song, but no. So one of the companies, that was like one of the first things they brought up on the phone interview, the phone screening. And I was like, I guess it works.

So I guess I did a good thing there. Omai's really into Python. He learned it while in the Navy, but he's been using it ever since. His Twitter bio even says, Python is life. So I asked him, how does being good at Python make you good at doing security work? Oh, man, Python makes it easy, right? Because Python is super well supported by so many people, and there's always someone writing a new library somewhere.

It makes it one of the most versatile languages. I would say that like no matter what your field is in InfoSec, you can probably use Python for something because there's always something that you can automate. There's always something that you can make easier. And for sure, Python is one of the most approachable languages to do that in. Like any human, nerdcore rappers suffer from loss and heartbreak too. Here's how Omai brings his relationship experiences into his music. Sometimes I look back and I think about the times that the

two of us were fearless lovers. Then we fell apart and we both had broken hearts, but we never got to clear our buffers. So you remain in memory. We both try to pretend to be okay when we get near each other. Two threads caught in a deadlock. Got the process dead stopped. You thought I had a show you could crack easier than a password hash without a salt. I thought we were on the same page when i moved into the region but turns out there was a page fault we played the game lost direction no d-pad

thought we would float after we dipped no t-bag you tried the course correct there was still a deep drag but it was a hard drive we needed to defrag oh yeah so that that song is uh about my ex-girlfriend. And I am not a very emotionally available person. I will say that out loud. It was basically that. I don't always open up to people. And so,

yeah. I sent her that song and she didn't understand any of the references. but i was like this is just me expressing my feelings so you executed code in my mind and you'll find that your thread dropped a lot of files but then the process died now your code is orphaned that's a problem child it's it does seem comical at the same time as that and all of this nerdcore seems comical of like oh my gosh i get that joke but i feel so nerdy getting it yeah and then that's definitely the vibe that i think a lot of um like that nerdcore is gone for like since inception is is like man i get this i get this because I can relate to it.

Now, Omai is working on the Red Team at Azure. This is the cloud computing service that Microsoft offers. So our job is to perform Red Team assessments against teams working on Azure products and services. So we're an internal team, right? We don't do customer facing engagements. And we basically just hack away and try to find new things either within Azure or against specific teams and how they organize their infrastructure or whatever else they have to organize. But get this, while yeah, he's hacking on Azure itself sometimes,

his scope goes way beyond the product. Right. So if you take like Azure Functions, for example, right, we're not looking for vulnerabilities in Azure Functions. That's for the product engineer teams and security assurance team. We're looking for ways to hack the Azure Functions development team, right? And any vulnerabilities that they may have that might lead us to take over the service, for example, which has bigger implications down the line. Wow, that's crazy, huh? He's trying to hack the people who work at Microsoft in order to help keep Microsoft

products more secure. Wild. The last song I want to leave you with from Oh My, it's called Tabs. I absolutely love it. articles I may read. If you saw the way my windows look, you'd call me crazy. I be spawning tabs like rabbits when they making babies. It's a maybe if you ask me if I ever plan to close them, never knowing if I need them. So they stay there for the moment. Always open up a new tab whenever I'm browsing. Tab count flex like Goku over 9,000. I got these tabs in my phone. Internet Explorer is not a browser. I'm tabbing in Chrome

Tabbing at home Every time I open up a new window My tabbing has grown Back to the bone When it comes to browsing I am the key Keeping tabs on the throne That is a stone

Keeping a memory like Call the Ram for the tabs on the home I got tabs in the browser I got tabs I got tabs in the browser I got tabs I got tabs in the browser. Our last musical act is none other than Dual Core.

Yes, I am Int 80. I'm the rapper in Dual Core, and I consent to this recording for the use of Darknet Diaries. Okay, just to clear things up, Int 80 is the name of the rapper, the guy we're talking with, and Dual Core is the name of the rap group. I'm beyond excited to be on the podcast. Your podcast is literally my favorite one.

I've listened to every single episode. I can't say that about any other podcast. And as soon as new episodes come out, it's like the first thing that I listen to. Well, it's always a trip for me to meet someone and find out that we have mutual respect for each other's work. I really dig Dual Chorus Music too. Here, check this out. So you ready to start? Sure, let's do it. All right, so what was going on in high school?

Were you a nerd then? Absolutely. Yeah, I got in trouble in high school. I took a C++ programming class and sent, using NetSend, I sent a message to all the Windows computers saying there was a virus in the system. And I waited until everybody had logged out at the end of the class period. And the next class period came in and they all logged in and got this message box popping up saying there was a virus. And I got kicked off the computers for like a week. And it was in high school where you started making music.

I listened to hip hop. There was a kid that I used to program and hack with on AOL. And he lived in New Jersey. And so we would either be talking about hacking or programming or hip hop. And we'd have discussions of who the best rapper was, etc. And he's actually the one that got me started rapping. He sent me an email with a rap verse that he wrote about how he was a better hacker than I was. And I paid it no mind because I knew that I was a better hacker than him.

And he kept bugging me to write a response back. So eventually, I wrote a response. And that was my first rap verse that I ever wrote. And it was about how I was a better hacker and programmer than he was. I remember making my first website and I was just learning HTML, but obviously I didn't know HTML particularly well. And I went to paste something into an IM to somebody and I thought I had some other content in the clipboard. But what I had was the markup from the website that I was building and it was all messed up and it crashed AOL or it froze it or something bad happened. And I was curious as to what happened. So I looked at what was in my clipboard

and it was the markup from my website. And there were some syntax errors, like the tags or the values were wrong or something. And at that point I realized, okay, what if I intentionally put bad values in the markup and then send that to somebody? And so then I just started kind of manually fuzzing, putting in strange values, like having a font size of a bunch of nines or starting the HTML

with like an ending HTML tag. And so what would happen is there were all these bugs in the AOL client and you would get kicked offline or AOL would freeze up or crash or something bad would happen. And at the time it was a dial up. so it took you like 10 minutes to get back online. So you'd be in a chat room, and someone would argue with you, and you'd turn off your IMs and send them an IM with this awful HTML in it, and their client would crash, and they would go away and get kicked offline. Started making fan sites of artists that could rap. Pasted some code in an IM to start a pay-your-wealth show. It was frozen on the markup. Came across proggies and tools made by others.

Kicking people offline, the scene called them bunners. Had the best strings, it would crash and hold the throne. So I couldn't give them out, had to code it on my own. VB3 downloading, feeling out of place. And so I used to trade these punt strings, this malformed HTML, for stolen accounts so that I could keep access. My parents would always get upset with me for some reason, and then they'd take away my AOL access. And so I had all these stolen accounts so that I could continue having access to the Internet.

And what really drove me into programming was I had like a secret stash of punt strings that I refused to share to anybody because they were so good. And so I needed a way to weaponize those. And so that drove me to learning Visual Basic and the Windows API so that I could write my own punchers to then kick people offline. DualCore actually collaborated with Whitey Cracker on this song. It's called I remember. I actually did not want to do computers as a career. I went to school. I have a Bachelor of Arts in political science, and I wanted to be a lawyer. And I really enjoyed classes like civil liberties and criminal

justice. I really enjoyed doing case studies, writing about dissenting opinions and concurring opinions. And I just, I always thought of the movie, The Matrix, where they show Thomas Anderson in his cubicle after he's just been yelled at by his boss. And it just looks like such a drab situation to be in. So that was my stereotypical view when I was younger about what having a career in computers would be like. But I was approaching graduating from my political science degree, and I went to a law day at a law school. And learning about how much you had to read and write was unbearable

for me. So I decided hacking computers is really fun and maybe I can get a job doing that or at least programming and building web apps and stuff, which is something I had been doing at that point. His first computer job was doing website development. He then started hanging out at security meetups. And from there, he got an internship doing security work. After that, he went to get a job doing application security, which is where he's paid to find bugs in the software that the company makes. Right, except I was a consultant.

So I would basically be on like a five-day engagement and we would do white box or black box assessments, white box being where you have exposure to the entire source code and black box where you're just targeting just like a regular site or an application without any knowledge of its source code. And then, yeah, for the first four days, you're pretty much hacking and just trying to find bugs, unfortunately.

Like I think in one of my first assessments, I think I like pivoted through the network and got domain admin and checked in with the engagement manager and said, okay, I've got domain admin, now what? And they're like, no, that's not what you're supposed to do. You're just supposed to take a screenshot of the alert box and relays shoot for the moon just one system filled the whole

room advanced back then to write plenty tracks i toppled colossus and zack zaniac back in the 50s before they had help my ai deceived even turing himself uh let's see at that point i think we had just started dual core so i i know we started dual core in 2006. That was when we were making our first album, Zero One. In 2007, that was when we released our first album, Zero One. And also in 2007 is when I got my first application security job. And I remember when I started at the company, people already knew about Dualcore, which was mind-blowing to me because I was just some kid recording rap songs in a basement in Cincinnati. So it was a shock to walk into a place and people already knew my music that had only been out for a few months. Dualcore is two people. It's myself and Dady. I'm the rapper in the group. And then the other half is C64.

So I write and record all the rap songs, and I have the mustache. And C64 makes all the beats. He does all of the mixing. He does all of the artwork, does some of our social media stuff. And he's basically all of the talent in the group, and I'm just kind of the loud person in front. New application, human surveillance, echelon intercept, analyze evidence, He's basically all of the talent in the group, and I'm just kind of the loud person in front. Penny Arcade published a blog post about our album, which got our music in front of a bunch of listeners. And I kind of used that as a springboard to start booking shows as, as rabidly as I could. So I said, you know, Penny Arcade is a big fan of our music.

Here's the link to their blog post. You should totally book dual core. And we ended up playing at DEF CON that year, just a few months after that, we were the first ever live hip hop act to play at DEF CON. And I've been playing every year since 2007, live in person, except for 2020 with the pandemic. 85 pounds on his frame made it pitiful alive in his mind. He nurtured a trust because that was the only thing they couldn't touch. He took up hacking to push away comatose pro-eco exploits, races and overflows. He made two friends named Mike and Tim and come to find out they were just like him. Yeah, I then moved into a position doing reverse engineering, and I was essentially cracking copy protection. So companies would come in with copy protection that would go on a particular device, and they would want to know how fast it could be broken. And so we would have three objectives usually.

One would be to pirate the intellectual property. One would be to reverse engineer the protection to get a full understanding of the protection. And then the third objective would be to tamper the protection without being detected. Sign the first line, it was just nine to five. Quickly realized it became nine to nine. 24-7, 365. A process that separated me from my life. Need to unplug, but you're still online. And you've got to pay the bills every month on time. we all know and have probably used at some point. And I worked on building threat systems for them.

So our goal was to be able to find any malware that was spreading or communicating across the platform and then sandbox it, pick it apart programmatically, figure out what it was doing, siphon out indicators, and then build new signatures and put it all on our compute and fabric storage, and then programmatically associate it with any other families. And then we could put detections and filtering in place to stop future campaigns and alert victims that were on the platform. While there, he discovered some malware on the platform which would mine Litecoin. This is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. He cleaned the malware off the infected systems,

but he realized he could do more than just stop it in his network. I reached out to the Litecoin mining pool and asked them if they would stop, basically like stop all of the progress for this particular account. And I had evidence of like, you know, these are the malware samples. Here's like in the code where it's using your pool, et cetera. And also the malware had stages up on Dropbox. So I worked with Dropbox and said, hey, like this is, this malware is like staging off of your platform.

Can we like find all of the instances of it? hey, this malware is staging off of your platform. Can we find all of the instances of it? And so Dropbox was able to find them all. And then the C2 was at some hosting company. So I reached out to the hosting provider and I said, hey, this malware got at C2 on a VPS in your hosting setup. Can I get a copy of the VPS? And they said, sure. And they I get a copy of the VPS? And they said, sure. And they gave me a copy of the VPS.

And that gave me all of the logs and keys that the malware authors use to log in and check into the C2. And then on a particular Friday, I said, hey, on this Friday coming up at 9 a.m. Pacific time, let's kill everything off. And so we did. We did this coordinated takedown. And that Friday at 9 a.m.,

the malware ceased to exist on the internet. And it was super fun. So after leaving the social media platform, I took a job as a red team operator. So I worked on the red team at Salesforce and our job was basically to make the bad things happen. Hackers are the future. We're the ones for you to bet on. Fuel to the fire like computers were a Chevron. This is all decades way before I met John. So I let on. Knowledge gives to wisdom. Got a job and it pays and it doesn't end in prison. Help secure computers by installing now we're in them. Hoping they don't twist it, turning me into the victim. We would start any red team operation

with asking the question, what's the worst thing that can happen to this business? The Salesforce has a number of acquisitions, so there's always fresh attack surface for us to look at. And we basically would try to go after things that were really important or critical to the business, things that mattered the most. Because if you're handing in a report to executives and you just say, look, I popped an alert box,

no executive understands why that's important, maybe not even what that is. But if you're able to say, look, I popped an alert box. No executive understands why that's important, maybe not even what that is. But if you're able to say, I have a copy of all of your customer data and I've put backdoors in the source code that makes your business run, and those are the most important things to your business, they're going to understand we're going to be out of business

or the stock's going to take a hit or bad things are going to happen. And so we would do that kind of stuff, right? We would try to exfil customer data so we would do that kind of stuff, right? We would try to exfil customer data, or we would try to backdoor source code, or we'd break into places sometimes. And so trying to frame the objectives in a more high-level way and telling a story rather than just handing in a report that people might not read. Just another hacker, just another past. Up until it shattered, sometimes calm, sometimes disaster. Turn the page and we start another chapter.

But that job didn't last long. If you Google DEF CON Salesforce, you'll see articles about a mishap that happened. And he got caught up in all that. I have since pivoted into a cloud engineering kind of role. And so I build cool stuff, but I also break things. And so it's a nice balance of getting both sides of it, right? Being able to construct and then also tear down and see how to construct it better in the future. Not every geek with a Commodore 64 can hack into NASA. The song All the Things came about by randomly being at DEF CON one year, and a friend of mine, Virus from DC-949, came up to me and said, hey, drink all the booze, hack all the things.

That's how we're doing it this year. And I said, oh, that's cool. Sounds like fun. And my producer was in from the UK. He had flown all the way to Vegas. And also with me was Dale Chase. And we were rolling around playing parties. And I think it was our fourth party of the night and we get there and the whole pool place is is packed it's just the pool area is

just filled with people all waiting for a dual core show and so i'm like all right so we show up and um my producer and I are talking, and we're like, what if we played a set where we just kind of make it up as we go? And so my producer is like, sounds good, and C64 is just throwing on whatever beats that he wants to throw on. We're not sticking to any particular set, and we're just going for it. And so Dale and I are just kind of wrapping verses. We're putting in hooks where we can.

And my producer plays this one beat. And I said, let's do a freestyle. I like this beat. Sounds good. Let's do a freestyle. And so I just say, like, all right, in the chorus, I'm going to say, drink all the booze. And everybody yell, hack all the things. And it was amazing.

We started the freestyle. And we got to the chorus. And I yelled, drink all the things. And it was amazing. Like we started the freestyle and we got to the chorus and I yelled, drink all the booze. And now it's four something in the morning in Vegas and the entire pool area is just people screaming, hack all the things. We drink all the booze, hack all the things. Drink all the booze, hack all the things. Several years after the song had been out, I got an email,

and it was a person who said, Hi, I work on the game Watch Dogs at Ubisoft, and we're making Watch Dogs 2, but nobody knows yet. And I saw you play at DEF CON, and I need your music in the game. So how do we do that? And I said, send me an NDA, and we'll get everything set up, and we need your music in the game. So can I, like, how do we do that? And I said, send me an NDA, and we'll get everything set up, and we'll make it happen.

And so they ended up including all the things in Watch Dogs 2. Then we're back in underground. There's no masking from us now. We pop tour notes around the globe, track and hunt you down. Hacked on schedule, added to your calendar. Devices online, here comes another challenger. Stay infiltrated, so undercover. This is for my comrades who stare at their debuggers and trace every buffer. Examining the code flow.

Haven't been to sleep, better pop another dodo's. I think I'll need a planet-sized urn. Some men just want to watch the world burn. Your turn. Jewelcore has continually grown more popular over time. And so much that he's been able to book live shows all over. I've played all across the U.S., Canada. I've played in Colombia.

I've played in Brazil. I've played in Dubai. And I've played all across Europe as well. We even did a three-week tour, me and my producer, in the U.K. UK. But when I started, I always thought that my ideal week would look like hacking stuff Monday through Friday and then playing rap shows on the weekends. And that is the structure that I've kind of derived or composed and have stuck with all these years. And it's worked out really well. I've done some tours where, you know, we're on the road for anywhere from like three to eight weeks. But for the most part, normal week for me is like Monday, I go to work. And then Thursday

or Friday, I'll fly out and play shows. And then Sunday or Monday, I'll fly back and Monday, I'm back at work again. Dualcore has done some collaborations with other Nerdcore rappers, but not all Nerdcore rappers are hackers. Like we were saying earlier, some nerdcore rappers talk about video games and some talk about anime, but in order for dual core to collaborate with these other people, he created a file sharing system on his server that he set up. However, he set it up using SCP, which is a secure file transfer method, but that takes a couple steps to set up. When I started doing collaborations with folks, I'd say, hey, here's a, like, send me your SSH public key, and I'll set you up with a user account, and then you can SFTP or SCP your waves up. And I thought, you know, everybody was a hacker

like I was in the nerd rap scene. And I think Whitey Cracker was the only person that when I said that, he didn't blink at night. He said, okay, no problem. Here's my SSH key. Good to go. Meanwhile, everybody else was like, what is SSH? What is a key? What is SCP? How do I get you the files? And so I always thought that was like a really funny experience, kind of having the realization that there aren't many hackers that are out making rap music. And see, that's what I think is interesting about this sliver of music in the world. The lyrics are about this specific type of computer usage. But not only that, it's made by hackers themselves for other hackers who want to hear songs about hacking. Hey, I dig it. And after

chatting with these guys, I really am surprised at how much they're actually doing security themselves. I don't know why, but I just assumed they were wannabe hackers. But no, they aren't. They really are doing this stuff. So now, when I listen to Nerdcore, I have a newfound respect for the musicians behind it. Feeling chaos, mama, when I open my eyes. A big thank you to Whitey Cracker, Oh My, and Int80 from Dual Core. I never had guests bring their own soundtracks on before, but this was a fun ride.

If you want to listen to just the music from this episode, I've created a playlist for you. Go to darknetdiaries.com slash episode slash 78. While there, you'll find more about each of these artists and really dive into their music because they have a ton of songs to discover. Also, I want to give a big thanks to my Patreon members. Those who are donating to the show are a massive help for the show's success. Thank you so much. But I did the math, and less than 1% of my audience is helping the show through Patreon. Look, if you've gone through every episode and can't wait for new episodes, consider donating to the show. This tells me most of all that you like it and want more of it, which motivates me to keep going and make it better. If you want to help, please visit patreon.com slash darknetdiaries. Thank you. This show is made by me, Sir Dollar String, Jack Reciter. Editing helped this episode by the funky cherry Damien, and our theme music is by Biggie Doom, aka Breakmaster Cylinder. And even though for some weird reason,

I think 1024 is a perfectly round number. This is Darknet Diaries.