Every Town - Homeless White Hat Hacker - Adrian Lamo - Wichita, KS

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

White Hat Hacker Adrian Lamo, broke into several computer networks of high-profile companies and got himself entangled in a controversy involving WikiLeaks. Suddenly, he earned the ire of prominent people and organizations and became a target. Despite having no permanent home he could call his own, perhaps it all became too much of a heavy load for him to carry, that at the young age of 37, he signed out...completely.🥇 Watch This Episode with like.....visuals! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDp3zZTPgBU🎉 Patreon (videos too hot for youtube) -  https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries 🎧 More Podcasts, we got you - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1235579 Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you love true crime, grab your favorite mug and pour yourself a dose of creepy true crime every single morning with a morning cup of murder. This short daily show is the perfect podcast to incorporate into your morning routine, because in less than 15 minutes, you'll hear about a true crime that took place on a day's date in history. Each day's dark history lesson will kickstart your morning with intriguing tales of murder, abduction, serial killers, cults, and everything in between. With over 20 million downloads, Morning Cup of Murder has something for every true crime lover. One listener describes the show as a small package with a powerful punch of crime.

Another writes that the show is an absolute delight in the morning. Support yourself a piping hot cup of murder every single morning with Morning Cup of Murder. Find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Today we head to Wichita, Kansas, where we learn about the homeless hacker Adrian Lamo and the suspicion surrounding his death. Not too many people can claim to be a part of the rare breed of genuses

identified as white hat hackers or threat analysts in America, but in there you can count Colombian American Adrian Lamo, who was also a journalist, media press, personality, and a target of salacious criticisms for doing what he did best. It was a distinction that gave rise to his fleeting fame, but it likewise tainted his name after breaking into several computer networks of high-profile companies and getting entangled in a controversy involving WikiLeaks. Suddenly, he earned the anger of prominent people and organizations, and this was the world of Adrian Lamo for almost 20 years, despite having no

permanent home he could call his own. Perhaps it became too much of a heavy load for him, and at the young age of 37, he decided to log out, and with it, his life got shut down too. Hi, I'm Andrew Fitzgerald, and welcome to this week's episode of Everytown, where we'll be focusing on the life and the trials and tribulations of Adrian Lombo. His talent and skill in manipulating computer systems was truly a gift that could have been his ticket to wealth and worldwide acclaim. But it proved to be a curse and a source of notoriety for the young computer prodigy, like no other whose life ended before he could ever redeem himself.

His death was surrounded by suspicions that left people pondering. Did his exploits as a genius hacker, Kurt-tailed his precious life. Adrian never managed to get his high school diploma or perhaps never bothered to. Yet he was still able to ascend to the Blackbell level in cyber hacking. His mother Mary said about her son. Ever since he was very young, he had shown a tendency to be a lateral thinker. In any problem you put in front of him with a computer, he could solve almost immediately. is a gifted analytical mind and a natural curiosity.

Mary and her Colombian husband, Mario Lamo, had three children, Andrea, Julian, and Adrian. The latter was born on February 20, 1981 in Malden, Massachusetts, which is just outside of Boston. But the family soon moved to Arlington, Virginia, then to Mario's hometown outside Bogota, Columbia. The siblings grew up in an educated bilingual. family, and Adrian spent his formative years there. He started becoming a computer geek when he was given a hand-me-down Commodore 64, which he used to hack into computer games and to play with viruses on floppy disks. When Mario and Mary soon were able to grasp their son's extraordinary talent, they bought him a more powerful IBM personal computer. Lamo family that moved to San Francisco,

California, where computer learning was more accessible for Adrian as a high school student. By that time, he already owned a laptop computer. During a computer class in his junior year, Adrian upstaged his teacher by solving a computer problem the instructor insisted was insurmountable. This resulted in their altercation, and Adrian was ultimately expelled. He didn't graduate from high school, although he received a GED. He was also court ordered to take courses at American River College, the community college in California, Sacramento County.

After this episode in his life, 17-year-old Adrian then left his home to live on his own. And soon after, his dicey hacktivity started. And what a voyage it had been for the White Hat Hacker. The adventurous life of Adrian took him down a path of a vagabond's life, traveling on foot or taking the affordable Greyhound bus. When he wasn't staying with friends sleeping on their couches, he spent nights and abandoned buildings, like the crumbling Philadelphia Restaurant Supply Shop

for the old officer's quarters at the Presidio in San Francisco. Living out of his backpack, Adrian ceaselessly accessed the online world from university libraries and Kinko's laptop stations. Adrian had said, I have a laptop in Pittsburgh, a change of clothes in D.C. It kind of redefines the term multi-jurisdictional. In the mid-90s, Adrian landed contract work at a promising technology upstart called America Online, working on planetout.com, an online forum that catered to the LGBT community. In 1998, he was appointed to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transnational, transnational,

gender, queer, and questioning task force by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At the time, advertisers paid AOL based on the amount of time visitors spent on the site, and so the young computer expert's job was to keep people glued to the page, chatting the mob for hours out of time. During this period, the World Wide Web was on a swift rise. Regular citizens and every business entity were flocking to the web, to stake a claim. AOL, an American web portal and online service provider, introduced instant messaging in 1997. Google launched its initial public offering in 2004,

assuring investors that it found a way to profit from searching. And a loose affiliation of computer geeks had started a small group of hacktivists that called themselves anonymous. All these developments were viewed by Adrian with a mixture of excitement, and alarm. He said that it was all so fragile and no one could see the dangers of the internet. And to prove his point, Adrian went on a hacking spree as a white hat hacker, which is an ethical computer hacker or a computer security expert who specializes in penetration testing and in other testing mythologies that ensures the security of an organization's information systems. Adrian would break into corporate computer systems, but without causing damage to the systems involved.

Instead, he would offer to fix the security flaws, free of charge, and if the flaw wasn't fixed, he would alert the media, hoping that public attention would force whoever it was in his hacker crosshairs to patch the security hall. Adrian's hacking was a way to underscore the point. Cracking into companies like AOL-Time Warner, Yahoo, Comcast, SBC communication, with such ease certainly suggested something was broken. If someone like him could do this, then anyone theoretically could. He discovered that these companies had enabled remote access to their internal networks via web proxies.

Adrian didn't steal information. He didn't hold people's computers hostage. He didn't make a milking cow out of hacking. He insisted that unlike the others in his trade, he wouldn't take money from the companies he'd hacked. Adrian clarified, When I was thirsty during Ex-Sight at home, they bought me a 50-cent bottle of water. That's the most I got. He survived relying on his meager savings from his stints at Levi-Strauss and from Bay Area non-profits doing security work.

It was good enough, since his cubicles, or the office elevators often served as a shelter at night. Adrian also was able to earn from his short-term freelance security gigs. In dire situations, his parents provided him with financial assistance. In December of 2001, Adrian was praised by MCI WorldCom for helping them fortify their corporate security. Administrators at several of the companies he's hacked had called Adrian brilliant and helpful in fixing these gals,

in network defenses. As expected, not everyone was impressed and pleased by Adrian's exploits, and the most critical were his fellow hacktivists. On the website called Security Focus, someone posted, is anyone impressed with Adrian Lamo's skills? He's not doing anything particularly amazing. He's not found some new security concept. He's just looking for basic holes.

Oxblood Rufian, the veteran of the hacker group, cult of the dead cow, replied, It's like dancing. Anyone can dance, but not many people can dance like Michael Jackson. Critics blasted the young computer genius as a charlatan who preams for the spotlight. And Adrian's longtime friend, Lorraine Murphy, seemed to confirm this. Adrian loved the attention coming from his followers. It is one thing to be gifted at hacking and another to be able to tell the world about it. He wanted to be a household name, fame, media.

That's what motivated him, she said. In 2002, Adrian did something that bolstered his celebrity status in the hacking trade. However, the result spelled unexpected disaster for him. In February of 2002, Balmo found an open prize. on the network of the New York Times, a 169-year-old publication with a worldwide influence and readership if you didn't know. Adrian took advantage of the open proxy, which he found in two minutes, browsed the publications corporate intranet, and downloaded its list of sources.

He then accessed the telephone numbers and contact information of such high-profile sources like Yogi Berra, Warren Beatty, and Robert Redford, as well as political figures, including Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. For reasons, only known to him, Adrian also added his own contact information to the internal database of expert sources. He gave himself a login and a password for the newspaper's account

with LexisNexis, a corporation providing computer-assisted, legal and business research and risk management services. The New York Times, of course, was not amused and thus filed a complaint against Adrian. After a 15-month investigation to New York federal prosecutors issued a warrant for the arrest of Adrian in August of 2003. He went into hiding for a few days, but on September 9th at 10.15 a.m., Adrian surrendered to the U.S. Marshals in Sacramento, California.

He re-surrender to the FBI in New York City then on September 11th and pleaded guilty to one felony count of computer crimes against Microsoft Lexis Nexus and the New York Times on January 8th, 2004. Six months later, Adrian was sentenced to two years probation with six months to be served as in-home detention in order to pay $65,000 in restitution. The expert hacker was convicted of compromising security. charity at the New York Times, Microsoft, Yahoo, and MCI World Kong. Commendably, Adrian had a fairly good amount of remorse in him. Court records quoted him during his sentencing. I want to answer for what I have done and do better with my life. On the favorite hacker radio program off the hook,

Adrian also expressed regret saying, I do think there were some lines I stepped on in my access. I want to take responsibility for this, and I want to put it behind me. This episode was a major letdown for Adrian, who expected a completely different ending. He told his friend Lorraine Murphy that he was really appalled that he didn't get a job offer as a security consultant of the New York Times out of it. He paid his dues for the blunder he had committed, perhaps with a self-serving intention, but one's fate can't be hacked and programmed. and Adrian's good intent

once again placed him in a compromising situation finally falling from grace starting in 2010. On October 4th, 2006, an organization called Sunshine Press in Iceland, launched the website of WikiLeaks, an international non-profit organization that publishes news leaks in classified media provided by anonymous sources. Its founder is generally believed to be Australian-Eleaks,

editor, publisher, and activist Julian Assange. As of 2015, WikiLeaks claimed it had released more than 10 million documents on its online platform since 2006. And yes, these documents were highly classified, controversial, and definitely damning. But it was in 2010 when WikiLeaks was brought in to the international spotlight, when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army Intelligence Analysts, Chelsea Manning. Afterwards, the U.S. government

launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks that led to the indictment of Assange and the conviction of Chelsea Manning. In the midst of these astounding controversies and legal rows, Adrian Lamo got involved

thinking that it would be to his advantage, but his good intention once again badly backfired. Let's refresh our minds about Chelsea Manning, who's at the center of this scandal, and at the receiving end of a conviction that almost cost her her life. Manning was born as Bradley Edward, who became a soldier for the U.S. Army in 2007. All along, Manning had been going through a gender identity crisis

and eventually transformed as trans woman Chelsea Manning, a dream she had wanted since childhood. Back to her stint in the U.S. Army in 2009, Manning was assigned to an army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analysts, which gave her access to classified databases. From January 5th to April 10th of 2010, Manning leaked classified information to WikiLeaks, which included the July 12, 2007 Baghdad Airstrike, known as the collateral video. And the 2009 Grenay Air Strike in Afghanistan video, 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables, and 400,000. 182,832 Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq war logs and the Afghan War Diary.

The materials were published by WikiLeaks and its media partners between April 2010 and April 2011. On May 20, 2010, Manning started chatting online with Adrian Lamo while the soldier was deployed in Iraq. They talked about her personal problems in the military. Then Manning confided to Adrian. the videos and documents she downloaded on WikiLeaks. She wrote him, I wouldn't mind going to prison for the rest of my life for leaking information, or being executed so much,

if it wasn't for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy. The CPU is not made for this motherboard. Menning also told Adrian that she had developed a working relationship with Assange communicating directly with him. them using an encrypted internet conferencing service, but knew little about him. On their May 22nd chat, Manning told Adrian that she hoped the materials she downloaded onto WikiLeaks would lead to worldwide discussions, debates, and reforms.

Adrian assured Manning that she was speaking in confidence, and Manning wrote, I'm not a source for you. I'm talking to you as someone who needs moral and emotional fucking support. to which Adrian replied, I told you, none of this is for print. But Adrian's assurance was just lip service. While Manning told him the explosive truth, Adrian won her confidence with an extreme lie.

Shortly after, she first communicated online with Adrian. The information Manning disclosed was discussed by Adrian with Chet Uber of the volunteer group Project Vigilant, which researches cybercrime, and with Timothy Webster, a friend who had worked in Army Counterintelligence. They only had one piece of advice for Adrian, go to the authorities. Webster informed the Army's criminal investigation command and Adrian was contacted by CID agents shortly thereafter.

On May 25, 2010, Adrian met and showed the chat logs he had with Manning to the FBI and Army investigators in California. He also passed the story to journalists and former Black Hat hacker Kevin Polson of Wired Magazine, which published 25% of the chat logs on June 6th and 10th, 2010, and the full logs in July of 2011. Ironically, it was Paulson who informed the New York Times about Adrian's hacking of its system that convicted the homeless hacker. So why did Adrian report Chelsea Manning? the ex-Army Marine turned whistleblower.

In an interview by Poulson, Adrian said he wouldn't have reported Manning if her leaks had endangered lives. She was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as she could and just throwing it up into the air, Adrian explained. As a consequence,

Manning was arrested by the Army CID on May 27, 2010 and transferred four days later to Camp Arabian. in Kuwait. She was charged with several offenses in July of 2010, replaced by 22 charges in March of 2011, including violations of Articles 92 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and of the Espionage Act, which she was handed a conviction in July of 2013. The most serious charge was aiding the enemy, a capital offense, although prosecutors didn't seek the death penalty, and Manning was acquitted of this charge.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum security U.S. disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. On January 17, 2017, President Barack Obama commuted Manning's sentence to nearly seven years of confinement, dating from her arrest on May 27, 2010. At the age of 30, Manning regained her life and freedom, but the man who turned her in to the authorities lived a living. life inundated by a string of sufferings. In 2010, Lamo thought to himself, what if somebody dies because this information is leaked? Referring to the Chelsea Manning WikiLeaks controversy. So the hacker tipped the authorities about Manning, perhaps thinking

his heroic act, would gain him public favor and renew his fame. But the tide wasn't in Adrian's favor, so he suffered greatly from the backlash. He was maligned. WikiLeaks denounced Adrian and Wired magazine writer Kevin Polson as notorious felons, informers, and manipulators, and said, journalists should take care. Adrian's fellow hackers detested him at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference in 2010, where Adrian spoke during a panel discussion in the midst of heckling. One attendee labeled him a snitch.

Another hacker told him, From my perspective, I see what you have done as treason. Julian Assange didn't mince words in criticizing Adrian in April of 2011. He called him a very disreputable character and said it was not right to call him a financial contributor to WikiLeaks since Adrian's monetary support amounted to only $20 on one occasion. All through this difficult period, Adrian's father Mario stood by him. He said,

He was vilified by many people by his position about the Manning affair. I was with him when this happened and understood that he lived by some principles and he stood for them. Adrian also had health concerns at the time he reported Manning to the feds. He had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome after being briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward. His father had reported him to the sacriarch. Sacramento Sheriff's office, saying he was worried that Adrian was over-medicating himself with prescription drugs. In 2011, Adrian disclosed that he was in hiding because he was getting death threats for betraying Manning's confidence and turning her in to the authorities. In 2013,

he told The Guardian that he'd struggled with substance abuse for a while. Adrian's wife, from 1997 to 1999, Lauren Fisher, noted that he used a wide variety of supplements, and drugs throughout his life, which prodded her to call it something like body hacking. In 2011, he overdosed on prescription amphetamines. His preferred supplement was cratum, which he used as a less dangerous alternative to opioids. After he turned in Manning in 2010, his drug use then escalated. But he later claimed that he was in recovery. Eight years later, his claim was proven as another lie.

In 2017, with tax returns declaring less than $1,000 in annual income, the homeless, Adrian Lamo, found help from a couple living in Wichita, Kansas. Bill and Debbie Scrogan found him a shelter in a senior living facility called Shady Brook Senior Apartment, a senior low-income housing apartment subsidized by the federal government in Wichita. Then on March 14, 2018, the facility's manager found Adriens, lifeless body, laying on a pile of clothes in his bedroom with blood oozing underneath. The county chief medical examiner, Dr. Timothy Rorig, found in Lamo's bloodstream a number of drugs. Klanazepam, adazolum, benedril, acetylopram, gabapentin, as well as some decongestants

and anti-diarrhea medication. They weren't enough to kill Adrian, the doctor. doctor had said, but he was likely in a fairly sedated state. The autopsy also noted that Adrian had a history of seizures, and one causing or contributing to death cannot be ruled out. Wichita police found no signs of foul play or anything suspicious about Adrian's death. Curiously, he was found to have a sticker underneath his clothes and attached to his skin, which read, Adrian Lamo Project Vigilant Assistant Director Threat Analysis Investigation

70 Bade Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 2,001. Was Project Vigilant, now a defunct organization that used to be a semi-secret government contractor in 2010 somehow involved in his death? The group's former general counsel, Mark Rashd, denied knowing even a tiny idea about the circumstances.

Suspicion that Adrian was killed to prevent him from testifying in Julian Assange's extradition hearing in February of 2020 surface, but it was never proven true. Perhaps Adrian's death was a vengeful act by Chelsea Manning. When asked if she had forgiven Adrian, Manning surprisingly said there was nothing to forgive. Adding that, I've never had any ill will toward Adrian at any time. I'm more mad at the government for using him. So this leaves us with the official autopsy report that said no definitive cause of death was identified.

However, found in Adrian's house were many bottles of pills. As a result, evidence pointed to an accidental death due to drug abuse. Did Adrian accidentally drug hack his body to fix the gaps in his own system? Or was there someone perhaps involved I just wanted it to look that way. So that's it for this week's episode of Everytown. Tune in next week for another episode filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories.

Because who knows? Maybe your town will be next.