My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses.
I wasn't a hacker for the money, and it wasn't to cause damage.
If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it.
So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock.
Your company is probably going to get hacked. The velocity and complexity of hacking attempts has skyrocketed, with companies routinely facing millions of knocks on the vault door.
I'm still a hacker. I get paid for it now. I never received any monetary gain from the hacking I did before. The main difference in what I do now compared to what I did then is that I now do it with authorization.
I was hooked in before hacking was even illegal.
I could have evaded the FBI a lot longer if I had been able to control my passion for hacking.
My hacking was all about becoming the best at circumventing security. So when I was a fugitive, I worked systems administrator jobs to make money. I wasn't stealing money or using other people's credit cards. I was doing a 9-to-5 job.
I didn't defraud the government by taking money that was not mine.