Darknet Diaries - Ep 17: Finn

Episode Date: June 3, 2018

A 14-year-old kid who finds himself bored in class decides to hack someone's twitter account and ends up with more than he bargained for.

With the right set of eyes, you can spot hackers on Twitter. They have a strange image in their bio, something shady or obscure, and they write in Unicode characters and comment on privacy and anonymous tweets. While looking for accounts like that for this show, I stumbled upon a Twitter account that went by the name of Finn, and it met all this criteria. And their pinned tweet read, I have to go quiet, and if you're wondering where I am, read this.

And there was a link to a news article, which said a high school had been hacked. The article didn't say much more than that, so I messaged Finn. No response. Days go by. Weeks. I eventually forgot about him. A month later, I got a reply. He said he did have a story for me, so I asked if we could talk on Skype. He said he had no way to do that, because he's messaging me on Twitter through a hacked handheld video game system, which was the only electronic device he had. He told me everything else was confiscated. I got the sense that he had gotten into some serious trouble. Another month went by and he messaged me again, this time asking for my number so he can call. I gave him my number and waited. Hours went by, nothing. The next day I got a

message that said he'd gotten in a car accident and couldn't call. A few moreours went by, nothing. The next day, I got a message that said he'd gotten in a car accident and couldn't call. A few more weeks went by. I got another message from him saying he'd call me this Friday at five. So I waited by the phone. Five comes, no call. Ten minutes later, I got a message on Twitter and he's telling me he thought he could make free calls from this hotel he's in, but he can't. So no call. I gave up at this point, thinking this call just wasn't meant to be. In fact, Finn's Twitter account got banned, so I had no way to reach him. But then he messaged me from another account, saying he can call now if I'm available. So, I agreed, and he called me. Hello. Hello. Wow. You finally connect. I know. He gave me the gist of what he had done.

I was looking for the Wi-Fi password of my school. I came across more than I expected, and was able to access the Twitter feed of the principal. This story felt wrong. It felt dirty to me. He was just so young, and I felt like if I did this story, I would glamorize him and his hacking, and I wasn't even that impressed with what he did. So I just sat on this story and didn't do anything with it for about six months. But then I was talking to a friend about this story and tried to see what they thought. And they saw it differently than me.

To them, this wasn't another hacker story. This was a story about a really smart kid, a different kid, a kind of smart and different that public schools fail because they aren't prepared to deal with kids like him. So I listened to his story again, and I found myself glued to it. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Recider. This is Dark by Delete Me. I know a bit too much about how scam callers work.

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incident response, and active monitoring 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 to make Black Hills Information Security world-class in security training. You can learn things like penetration testing, securing the cloud, breaching the cloud, digital forensics, and so much more. But get this, the whole thing is pay what you can. Black Hills believes that great intro security classes do not need to be expensive, and they are trying to break down barriers to get more people into the security field.

And if you decide to pay over $195, you get six months access to the MetaCTF Cyber Range, which is great for practicing your skills and showing them off to potential employers. Head on over to blackhillsinfosec.com to learn more about what services they offer and find links to their webcasts to get some world-class training. That's BlackHillsInfosec.com. BlackHillsInfosec.com. Just a fair warning up front, this episode contains a lot of bad language. If that's a problem for you, you might want to skip this one. At an early age, Finn found computers to be really fascinating.

One day, I was 11. I was homeschooled. And my boss allowed me to monitor him at work. That's Finn's mother. I knew if I was going to do this story, I'm going to need her too. So she was able to watch my computer constantly. And one day I was messing around with command prompt and I was able to get into her computer. And I started just, I guess you could say, normal 11-year-old being curious just started messing around. And I figured out how to set up a fake screen. So I took a screenshot of, like, my initial screen, and I would overlay that over what I was doing.

Where it looked like he was learning and participating in the class work, but he was off doing whatever it is that he's doing somewhere else on the computer. And he crashed my computer. So that's kind of when we knew that he had a higher skill set than we had anticipated. I'm a huge, I'm a huge nerd. But it was derived from a multitude of films that I felt like the main character I could relate to, one of them being Tron Legacy. That was the movie that I think really kick-started me before I even knew it, into computers.

What am I supposed to do? Survive. So I have a sister and two twin brothers and I have a baby brother and he's one years old. Counting me, there's five. I'm the oldest, so it all lies on me. I have Asperger's and ADHD. I have something called visor motor complex. It's, I think, it's when it's, it makes math harder for me.

I was in denial because as a parent, you don't want anything wrong with your kid. And then one day we ran out of medication. And that's when I knew we could never run out of it again. Oh my Lord, he was just everywhere. Literally, he was like a ping pong ball bouncing off the wall. It was just like, he went from one thing to another, even having a conversation with him was like, what are you talking about? But then once he has his medicine, it's more calmer, more focused, more order. And he seems to thrive on the order. I remember as a kid, we used to live on like the worst of the worst side of the city that

we used to live in. It was nothing but gang violence. You couldn't walk down the street at night. Heck, if you walk down the street, you don't carry anything on your pockets. Don't wear expensive shoes. Like, walk barefoot if you have to. It was that sort of bad. I'd say at five years old, that was like the last time we were there.

And we moved to the somewhat okay side of town but still not the best he started out you know of course regular school like everybody else and then he went to be in homeschools i had to do a lot of um con academy and stuff to be able to teach him things i thought you know i have a college degree and I just thought it would be easy to homeschool him, no problem. But it was quite different. It was quite a lot of experience for what it is for a child that has diagnosis that he has

and what it's like for them to learn. Finn started to realize he was good at computers. Exceptionally good. Better than anyone else in his family, even. Someone needed, like, a problem with a computer, I was pretty much the main IT. I think that's kind of where I got my cockiness from. Just when I would help them, they'd be like,

yeah, you did a good job, Finn. Congrats. And I would have probably the biggest smile on my face as a kid. When Finn has a computer problem, he thinks it through differently than others. He sees things very differently than we do. He sees things in binary numbers. So, like, simple things like adding and subtracting and multiplication, those things seem very easy, very simple for us. But for Finn, it seems to be more of a complicated thing.

So things that are more complicated for us, like quadratic equations or stuff that uses letters and numbers, which we have to kind of work at or, you know, figure out, they come very easy to him. I like to see it as a game. I make mental maps. So it's like, what can I do and what will I do? Finn bounced around a few schools. Public just anywhere dealing with people, I guess. I was always bullied. It didn't matter where I went. So I could go to church and I would be bullied.

I could go to school and I would be bullied. I guess it was because I was shy and I didn't talk. Or it was just the way I was dressed or something. But I do not look like your stereotypical African American, I'd say. I guess that's also kind of what led me to my love of computers. I found more friends on the internet. It's the anonymity. You and that person don't know what you both look like.

So they, it's to me, growing up, it was like they can't judge me if they don't know what I look like. In ninth grade, Finn moved from a private school to a public school. In ninth grade, it was fucking... I felt like I was in a war zone. It was like if you reintroduced the main character back into society. That's kind of what it felt like for me. It was like, well, this

is odd. I went from having, say, round four, five kids in my class that, you know, I would become good friends with, where now I have seven different classes, 20 different students, nobody that I know. Just before switching schools, Finn got a new tablet, and it became his primary way of going online.

I only used my tablet because my family didn't have a laptop at the time. This was a $52, 62 gigabyte tablet from Walmart. I would compare it to your average ScriptKitties tablet. It had an anonymous wallpaper. The apps on it were from this app, I think Bugtroid. It was an app that had a bunch of the apps used for penetration testing. I was definitely addicted to that

tablet. By now, Finn has been in his new public school for four months. He's made a few friends, mostly outcasts and those kids who sit in the back of the class and laugh. It's ninth grade, it's a week before Thanksgiving, and it's Friday. And he goes to school just like any normal day.

But on this day, everything changes. I was 14. I remember my day started off with me watching the show Mr. Robot. Hello, friend. I had just recently started watching it. My first period was my computer class. The class was boring. So you were learning, oh, this is the part of the computer.

I'm like, well, yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Like, everyone should pretty much know this by now. I would rather watch an ant, like, pick up a leaf than sit in a classroom. I find some of the classes in schools are utterly useless. So I was failing my computer class, ironically. My second period was math, and Lord God, did I hate that period. Third period is health. So I'm sitting in that class, and we're watching this video called Supersize Me.

A guy eats McDonald's. I don't know why anyone would want to do that. So we were watching that video, and I got super bored super quick. I'm not into seeing a guy eat. That's kind of weird. So I whip out my tablet. There was another guy who was also a hacker.

And we both came up with the goal of finding the Wi-Fi password. There's two Wi-Fi networks. So you have the BYOD, which is the bring your own device policy. And then you have the Wi-Fi that was only for the teachers. So while Super Size Me is playing, Finn and his friends started exploring the school's network. They started looking at any shared drives

and connected folders that were on the school's network. Finn had found a specific server that seemed interesting. So the server had a redirect. So if you were to type in the search bar redirect slash, let's say, Joe, John Joe, it would pop up a little folder of what was on his computer. So you were able to see what they had downloaded, what they were holding on their computer, certain drives and stuff like that. I was definitely curious as to why was this particular server open?

I'm like, this isn't right. This shouldn't be open like this. That's when I started, I guess, what I like to call my Hulk mode. So I went around just looking for any and everything. If something looked interesting, I was saving it. So what I would do is I would get the folder and open Google Drive on the browser. And I would copy and paste the files into there. That way there was no, I guess you could say, paper trail of me actually downloading the files.

So Finn downloads a bunch of files from this shared folder. And that shared folder happened to be the principal's computer. I didn't know the guy was the principal at first. I didn't know the dude, never even had seen him. So I thought, there's nothing interesting in this, but I guess I still will take a look. And so I'm scrolling down about 180 files. Finn finds a copy of the principal's hunting license, his driver's license, and a bunch of the student and faculty information.

And I'm like, okay, that's... What more is there? Like, there has to be more of this. So I'm at the bottom of the page, and there's this little Word document file titled Passwords.

Immediately, I facetimed myself because I was quite ashamed that this is what it had came to, that someone was saving passwords not only in a Word document, but it was unprotected, and it was obviously labeled. It was Soveter.

So I looked in the file. I see at the bottom of the text document, he has a Twitter password. It's now lunchtime. Finn collects his stuff, heads to the lunchroom, starts looking for his friends. So you've seen Mr. Robot. I would say it's more like the moments

where Elliot's kind of like talking to himself. Please tell me you're seeing this too. So I'm in that phrase where I'm like, okay, I've got two options that I can do here. I could go to whoever I can even think of, report this, or I can have a little fun. So I'm sitting at lunch with my buddies. You know, I'm still thinking about this passwords folder.

At this point, it's itching my brain. It's like, come on, dude. Oh, like, do something. So I'm like, all right, let's just see if he really is this dumb. So I go through the list of passwords. So I tried the first one on his Twitter. Doesn't work. Tried the second one on Twitter.

Doesn't work. And so I make it to, I guess, the 11th one. And I'm like, if this doesn't work, then shoot the guys. Guys are hackable. So I entered in not expecting anything to happen. So I look up and my friends are joking.

And then I looked back down at my tablet and all I see is, Twitter would like to use your location. Do you want to allow this? All the noise around me just stopped. I'm like, oh shit. This fucking worked. What do I do?

And it all kind of hit me. It was like, yo, I could go to jail for this. And that's where hell breaks loose. Finn starts posting stuff on the principal's Twitter and then quickly deleting it after his friends see it. So I would post something like,

God bless the KKK or something edgy, and then quickly delete it. And they were just laughing. Mind you, the principal is, no joke, two steps away from us, sitting at a table. So everyone was like, dude, you've got some, like, fucking balls. My little kid self comes out again, he's like, hell yeah.

Next I'm like, what if I went to the website? So I went to that school's official main webpage. I first scanned the page using this app called Admin Panel Finder. It looks for stereotypical admin page login. So I found the one for the website. I knew the principal's email. Everyone's email is set up the same. So you have last name dot first name at school.

So this was pretty common sense type of knowledge. So I enter in this email. I realize, what if he's using the password from Twitter for this? At this point, I'm already pretty screwed, if not. Why not? I'm more pissed at this point because I'm like, this is fucking stupid. Why and how do you allow this to happen? So I click the enter button and I look up and my friends are like, dude, dude, that's fucking awesome.

And then one of my friends who I call the bad luck guy because I swear on everything that he jinxed me. He was like, dude, you're going to get in trouble and then got up and walked away. I'm now worried, excited, scared

and pissed. So I'm a fuck ton of emotions at that point. I'm not, I'm definitely like, I'm not thinking straight. If you were to ask me 1 plus 1 at that point, I probably would have said 52. I look back down at my tablet and

I'm in. Finn now has logged into the school's main website as the principal. This website has things like announcements, school closures, upcoming events, and teacher bios. But Finn's access only allows him to change the principal's bio.

So I'm like, now like just fuck everyone, man. I wiped everything. So his picture, that was deleted off this website. His biography, that was deleted. His email, gone. His phone number, gone. Anything associated with him was gone. So I couldn't upload anything more than an image. So I took his name,

deleted it, and I put hacked by handle that I used to use. And then I upload this image from the game Watchdog. And I uploaded that as the image of him pretty much flanking off the camera. So after I uploaded that, I start writing. I said, fuck the school name. Fuck the main IT guy. Fuck my

principal and fuck the board of education. So after that, I click post. Lunch is over. Finn heads to his next class. So I'm walking into my literature class. I'm kind of like in this surreal state. Finn shows the school website to a friend he had in that class. And he was like, dude, did you do that?

And I'm like, yeah. He's like, dude, you need to like, don't do anything else, man. Like fucking chill. So I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. You're right. But then a bell rang out of nowhere. It was just a second lunch bell, but for a moment he thought it was the intercom and they were calling him up to the office. And I guess you could say that was kind of like what set me off again. So I'm like, you know what?

Fuck it. So I go into Twitter. Again, I go through the procedure, wipe his name, and I change his image, hacked by a handle that I used to use.

For the rest of literature class, Finn proceeded to tweet as the principal. Guess who just got fucking hacked? And that was the first post. He then posted the principal's social security number and other private info. Finn went on to post links to Pastebin, where he was posting private documents. The first was... Employee data list. Their name, their birthday, their addresses, their phone numbers, what car they drive, their license plate, their park, where they park.

It was super detailed. And then he did another post. Students' parents' name, email, location, phone number. And then another post of all student emails. I posted the list of everybody's email and then everybody's password. And then I think I cast it off with like, fuck the board of education and then fuck the main IT guy because he was not doing his job. I felt like he failed not only me, but he failed my friends, my teachers, the parents, my mom.

I felt like he failed everybody. And that's what, I guess, really set me off. And somehow this whole time, Finn's teacher didn't notice he was on his tablet. No, she never noticed. Like, because I was in the back of the classroom mind you so she has to pay attention to 20 other students which is it's another reason i hate public school i feel like anything can go wrong and in this case it it actually did my friend the guy i was talking to he's like dude put the fucking tablet up so i'm like, okay, okay, okay, I'm done. So I put the tablet in my bag,

and at that point, we're pretty much near the end of literature class. Finn grabs his backpack and walks to the next class. I feel like I'm a terrorist. Like, I'm carrying a bomb, and nobody knows it but me. I felt like at any moment, like, fucking Secret Service was going to pop out of nowhere and like, just black bag over my head and I'm gone. So I'm like, ah, fuck, fuck, fuck. Jesus, what did I do?

I think I may have fucked up. I don't know. I just tried to get my mind off of it while I was walking. I'm about two steps away from the door of my history class. This kid who I knew, who used to be an anonymous, he passed me and he's like, yo, dude, did you hear? Somebody hacked the principal's Twitter. I'm like, god damn it.

So I'm like, okay, maybe it's just him. Who knows? I walk into class. Everybody's fucking talking about it. I'm like, whoa, is it really this big of a deal? Like, holy shit. How quick does news get around? Finn tries desperately to keep his mind off the hack. He keeps his tablet on his desk, but keeps it off the whole class. He stays focused on his assignment. This is the last class of the day. There's only a few minutes left of class. Out of the blue, Datacom comes on.

I'm freaking out again. At this point, I'm shaking. Obviously, I'm shaking and they call code yellow so code red is like an active shooter or there is a definite threat in the school the code yellow is where they're like we don't know if this happened in the school or out the school when the code yellow happens, all doors are locked. Only the administrators are able to get in. You're locked in, pretty much. And at that point,

I hear the doors of the main building open. And I hear a cop radio. So principal's, like, super pissed. So they're trying to call him down. He's pissed, sad, confused. I could see where he was coming from. I guess you could say I felt his emotions.

They go through one of the classrooms. You don't hear nothing. It's dead silent for five minutes. My desk is just sitting there. After those five minutes, our door opens. It's the assistant principal. So he goes and he's like, okay, everyone, I need to see your phones. I need you to just press the power button and let me see what you're logging on.

So he goes through everyone on the right side and i'm now like i'm on panic mode if i probably looked like a crackhead um because because i'm like visibly shaking i'm like oh shit he's got fpcs that have my talent in my he's going to want to check it so um not even thinking twice i slide to the tablet like behind the file cabinet to where i can still get it, like, when I'm about to leave. But you wouldn't notice that it's behind the cabinet. So he goes through every one. He's like, okay.

Radio's in all clear. And walks out. After that, 10 minutes goes by. The intercom comes back on, and, um, the lady announces, The code yellow is over. Everyone have a nice day. Finn grabs his tablet from behind the cabinet, throws it in his backpack, and starts heading for the bus to go home. At that point, I'm, uh, not only am I just shaking physically,

I'm pretty much in tears. I'm scared at that point, not only am I just shaking physically, I'm pretty much in tears. I'm scared at that point. I will honestly say that I definitely cried. I was like, I fucked up. There's no way I can go back and fix this fuck up this time. While I'm walking to the bus, I was quiet. I just breathed, I guess. It was like having your last meal before you go into jail.

This is my last time probably being here. Being in this moment probably being here. You get this moment being free. And I get on the bus, and everyone's on the bus is talking about it. Even the guy who I was working with, he was even talking about it. He said, whoever fucking hacked the school is a fucking idiot. At one point, I was God. And now I'm the fucking devil. In an instant.

It's like I had power in my hand, and I blinked, and it was gone. I had my shitty little old tablet and I turned it back on and I plugged in my headphones and I listened to music all the way home. This episode is sponsored by SpyCloud. With major breaches and cyber attacks making the news daily, taking action on your company's exposure is more important than ever. I recently visited SpyCloud.com to check my darknet exposure and was surprised by just how much stolen identity data criminals have at their disposal. From credentials to cookies to PII.

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like just thinking I didn't know what to do every day after school I always messaged my mom because that's my mom. I want to make sure she's okay. So I messaged her and she was like, so how was school? I remember getting a call about school being on lockdown. I was like, yeah, someone leaked the principal's information. I don't know when in the hell made me tell her, but I fucking did.

I asked him, did you have any involvement in it? I don't know what made me ask him that, but I did. Of course, at that time, he lied to me. And I think that's when she knew that, yeah, he did something. And he's not telling me. The school called me and asked me, could I bring Finn's tablet to the school?

And so I did. Because Finn had told me that he had no involvement in the situation. So she came into my room. She was like, hey, where's your tablet? And I was like, oh, it's right here. She was like, I need to see it for a little bit. And so I said, okay. I thought maybe she needs to do something.

And I didn't think too much of it. Mom took Finn's tablet to the school. And that's when they told her about the hack. I stayed at the school while they did their little investigation, trying to figure out if this was actually the tablet that had done it. It had a code on it. So I had to call Finn and ask him what was the code. She's like, hey, Finn, I'm at the schoolhouse. We need the code for your tablet. The first thing that comes to my head is, fuck. Fucking kill me. If I had known, I would have definitely

wiped my tablet before giving it to her. So the code that I had given her was to the tablet's safe mode. So Finn gave us some kind of mixed up code. I was there for three hours, probably more,

because they called somebody off the campus to try to get past the walls inside of this tablet in order to find out if this was the exact same IP address. After three hours, the school did determine the tablet was used in this hack because of a matching MAC address. My kid did this. Like, are you sure we're talking about the same kid? And then the other part of me was, wow, like he did this. I didn't understand why he had done it

because it just, it didn't make sense. You would have thought that maybe something would have happened that would have triggered this event. Maybe like he got in trouble at school, went to the principal's office, something of that nature. But none of that had happened prior to this incident. So mom drove home. I had a talk with Ben. Yes. Yes. We're just going to go with that. Yes, we talked. That was the first time I think I've ever really seen my mom cry. But we talked. I can't even remember what we talked about. I would get hit with a nuclear bomb for my mom.

I would die for her. And that was the first time I felt like I'd hurt her. And I didn't want to ever feel that again. A few minutes go by. I'm sitting in her room. My stepdad's in there. Two cops enter the house. Your heart drops because you know that it's something because you just left the school and you're wondering like,

dang, how'd I get them here so fast? That was number one. And then number two is like, are they going to take my child out of my house right now? And then as a parent, there's nothing I could do right now in this moment to fix it. There's nothing I can do to protect him from this moment. I was just like, shoot, this happened way too damn quick.

At least let me have some time to fucking think at least. I was worried not about going to jail, but how my brothers and sisters would be affected by seeing me go to jail. I was more worried about how this was affecting them and not me. So at the time, I was also on the phone with my parents. And then my mom was like, hey, y'all need to stop talking to them and you need to get a lawyer. So at that time, I had to tell them that we no longer could talk to them. And of course, they didn't like that, but they knew that they had to go because they weren't there with any warrants of arrest. And the cops leave. I was frantic because this all happened leading up to a weekend, meaning that I had to try to get representation for him by Monday.

By 10 p.m. that night, the school's website was back to normal, and the tweets were deleted. But there were a lot of views to that private information that was posted. So who knows how many copies were made and who had it. That weekend, the family found a lawyer. The police asked the mom to bring Finn down to the station. The police took his fingerprints and a mugshot and let him go home. The school suspended him permanently and informed the family that they would be taking him to court. He now had to go to an alternative school, which is a place that kids with behavior problems

or have gotten in trouble can still go to for an education. But all of Finn's old friends were afraid to talk to him. No one wanted to talk to me. I was kind of a superhero and within a period, I was the supervillain. So now with this new supervillain persona labeled on me, nobody wanted to associate with me. It was back to square one again. What were the kids like in that alternative school? Have you ever heard of the school-to-prison pipeline? I haven't heard of this before, so I had to look it up. The school-to-prison pipeline is where kids

from disadvantaged backgrounds have a higher tendency to become locked up because of increasingly harsh school policies. It is debated, but some experts believe that once a kid starts down a path of being behind, getting suspended, and going to an alternative school, they're likely to wind up in jail or prison. As if life wasn't hard enough for you already, if you end up here, your odds of turning your life around are getting slim.

I would say if you were to walk in, you'd be like, yeah, there's definitely a school to prison pipeline. Definitely. I went from an environment where it was, you know, 90% Caucasians, where now it was, I am a part of the majority class. We're talking about a ratio of 90% African Americans. And I think the alternative school that I went to, it opened my eyes because I've seen the school to prison pipeline. I've seen people that I used to sit in with class at the alternative school get arrested at the alternative school. I've seen fights happen there. I've seen drug deals Bad things were happening at the school

But there were people The teachers Who cared If you were having a bad day You could sit there and talk to That other teacher for an entire hour Or for however long you needed You also had smaller classrooms.

So if you were, you know, let's say somehow you snuck in the phone, you were 90% going to get caught. That school really did change me. Yeah, he was actually doing very good at the alternative school. Like, he was passing all of his classes. I even had requested that they leave him there

because he was just doing so much better. Actually, he had gotten a job, I mean, all on his own. And so he had started to kind of like, OK, you know, let me start trying to get myself together. A year goes by, my lawyer calls, hey, have you gotten a letter? No, I haven't gotten a letter. She's like, well, I'm not going to call them. You don't call them. They're supposed to contact you. So we don't. We thought it was over with.

We thought, you know, nothing's going to come of it because they had told us juvenile court doesn't take this long to process cases. Another year comes and goes by. I come home one day after school and my sister comes in with this paper. She's like, this is for you. And I open it and it's a court summoning. I'm like, fuck. Like two years? This is two years and they're now wanting to send me to jail? I was prepared on day one.

Why two years? So I called my mom. You know, you could tell in his voice, like his heart just sunk. And so did mine. I was scared. Like, why wait so long? The court date comes. Finn and his mom and his lawyer sit on one side of the courtroom.

On the other side is the principal, district attorney, and some members from the Board of Education. From what was said in the court, apparently in my county, I'm the first person to ever been there for computer hacking. Because this was the first hacking case seen by the court and judge and DA, a lot was confusing to them.

Nothing was agreed on, and the principal had brought new evidence in saying his credit was damaged because his data was leaked. So they had to come back a second day. And on the second day, Finn pled guilty, and the judge convicted him of a felony. And it ended up being that he didn't have to serve time because of the fact that in that time, for two years, he had gotten a job, maintained that job, and actually had to go to work that weekend. They didn't want to interfere with him being productive. I had six months that I could not be on social media, write a letter of apology. I have an entire year in probation. I have to pay restitution, which is $1,300. Every time I'm on the internet, I have to be supervised. And of course, that's someone over 18. So either me, my husband,

or my mother had to be sitting there and able to say that we were monitoring what he was actually doing on the computer and that we saw what he was doing on the computer. But it really allowed me to see how much he was spending on the computer. That's just where our world is. Everything we do is either the phone or the computer. So it's getting even harder to limit his access when everything that he has to do involves it. And I'm constantly having to stay learning. I didn't know that emoji was a language, but it is. So I constantly have to stay on my toes as a parent to learn those things.

You know, my husband's all for it. Let's just take them away and not, you know, let them have them. And I'm like, okay, but then they're still going to find their friends that have them. I can't tell you how many cell phones I've confiscated from him because he still tries to get on there. How do you as a parent in this computer age and time monitor your kids? Yeah, there's things out there like Circle and stuff that you can put on different devices to try to monitor and look at those things. But what if you have a kid like mine that is smart enough to get past that?

Then what do you do? How do you as a parent monitor that? Because you didn't grow up in that age. After this whole incident with him, the school changed their whole computer policy. When the school year started, my other kids came back with BYOD letters that we always get every year. It had completely changed. And it was funny because a lot of things they had put in there mimic his case. And so I was like, oh, they changed that because of my child.

They changed that because of my child. They did that because of my child. They changed that because of my child. They did that because of my child. But it didn't change how they plan to deal with if another child like mine comes through there. What are you going to do to help challenge that student? When listening to Finn's story, I have a hard time figuring out exactly where everything went wrong. Maybe this is a normal reaction to a lifetime of being bullied or growing up with the diagnosis he has. His parents did what they could to educate him and keep him out of trouble, but life happens and he had to go to public school. Maybe the public school

should have looked after him more and spotted his talents and shortcomings. Maybe his teachers should have noticed him being bored in class and tried to inspire him. But public schools struggle with finding good teachers who will work for little pay and to be able to afford a good IT admin. So looking back on the story, it just seems like there's a number of failures here and not just one. What Finn did was wrong, really wrong. Supposed personal and public data like that can cause serious problems. And there were dozens of people potentially hurt because of this. And the worst was the principal. A feeling of having your personal data posted publicly is horrifying and you feel violated. Finn apologized

to the principal saying he's sorry that he was part of this. It's clear from hearing this story that some schools aren't capable of dealing with kids like him. Courts aren't ready for these kind of cases either. And this isn't an isolated case. I see problems like this all the time. In fact, when I was making this episode, a school IT admin approached me with a similar story. All this is happening now, in 2018. Computers have been in schools for over 20 years now, and when they still struggle with issues like this, it's clear that this is a serious problem. It's just a reminder that we're still in the infancy of the computer age, and our parents and schools and courts are still struggling to navigate through it i am ready for him to kind of set his wings and hopefully to go off to college to where that he can hone in on those abilities that he has and that's an environment i think that he would just thrive in so that's my hope honestly I don't want to be the black hat. I don't want to be that guy who's always on the bad side of the spectrum. I want to be the good guy.

I want to continue looking for companies who will give me at least an internship. I want to make sure that I'm putting my skills to good use to make the world and the internet a better place. Finn is a kid who the public school failed, the court systems didn't know what to do with, and whose parents struggled to understand. A kid who wanted to be a hero, just doing what he knew how to do best, and achieved his goal for one single period, and then became a villain of his own story. You've been listening to Darknet Diaries. If you love this show,

please visit darknetdiaries.com slash love. There you'll find ways to help this show and boy does it need help. I'm Jack Reisider and this episode was produced and edited by me and Stephanie Jens. She's that friend I told you about earlier that thought there's more to this than just another hacker story. Theme music is by the talented and mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Thanks for listening.