Cybercriminals, the shadowy online figures often depicted in Hollywood movies as hooded villains capable of wiping millions of pounds off the value of businesses at a keystroke, are not usually known for their candour.
But in a sixth-form college in Manchester this week, two former hackers gave the young people gathered an honest appraisal of what living a life of internet crime really looks like.
The teenagers in the room are listening intently, but the day-to-day internecine disputes they hear about is not the stuff of screenplays.
“It’s just people getting into these online dramas and they’re swatting and doxing each other and getting people to throw bricks through their windows,” one of the hackers says.
If the language sounds unfamiliar, it should – “swatting” and “doxing” involve people outing each other online by posting their genuine identities – but their message is clear: though cybercrime may seem alluring, the reality is anything but.
The hackers are former members of a sprawling cybercrime ecosystem dubbed “The Com”, and they’re here for a very particular reason – to urge talented teenagers to use their gaming and coding skills for the good.
The talk is part of an initiative backed by the Co-op, which suffered a debilitating hack in April last year. The retailer has teamed up with The Hacking Games, a startup that identifies talented gamers to test companies’ IT systems, which wants youngsters to use their skills to help companies fight back against criminal hackers.
Conor Freeman, 26, from Dublin, was jailed for just under three years in 2020 for his role in a $2m cryptocurrency theft and spoke to students at Connell Co-op College near Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium last week.
Freeman became a part of the Com – short for “community” – after being groomed online by an older teenager while playing Minecraft. The association spiralled into attending hacking forums on the dark web and eventually hacking people’s crypto wallets along with other Com members.
“I stumbled on these various different dark-net hacking forums and that’s when things really started to escalate,” he says. “I just fell into these different communities, different groups, befriended a couple of different people, and then found myself involved with large-scale cryptocurrency theft.”
Freeman served 11 months of his sentence and is now employed by The Hacking Games as an ethical hacker.
Fergus Hay, co-founder and chief executive of The Hacking Games, said there was a “100% overlap” between gaming and hacking. Describing gaming as a “live laboratory for skills development”, Hay said skills learned in gaming – particularly “modding” or creating software that helps you alter a video game – can be used in either hacking or cybersecurity.
“And the people who’ve worked that out are the bad guys,” says Hay. He adds: “So what you’ve got is a whole generation of natural-born hackers who’ve got incredible aptitude, but they’re invisible. No one’s seen their skill sets because they aren’t advertised on LinkedIn.”
Hay’s company has designed an AI-powered test to identify skills among proficient gamers who could make the jump to cybersecurity and help companies detect flaws in their IT systems via “red teaming” – or ethical hacking – where their networks are subjected to attacks by expert computer users.
Freeman was joined via video link by Ricky Handschumacher, a 30-year-old US citizen who was part of the same crypto heist and served four years in prison for the crime. The talk at Connell College was the first time Freeman and Handschumacher had ever seen each other physically. Handschumacher, who also fell into the Com via gaming, told the audience that he would have taken a different path had he known that you could be “paid a lot of money to do the right thing”.
Computing students who attended the talk said they had been inspired.
“The lesson is there’s great opportunities for you to go into computing, but you have to be watchful of what you’re doing because if you do something wrong, it will quickly harm your future,” said Suheil, 17.
Rob Elsey, the Co-op group’s chief digital officer, who led the organisation’s fight back against a ransomware hack that cost £120m in lost profits, said the talks were about “helping young people recognise that the digital skills they already have can be a force for good, protecting people, organisations and communities rather than being misused or exploited”.
The Co-op is planning more Hacking Games talks across its 38 school academies this year.
In July last year four people including three teenagers were arrested at addresses in the West Midlands, Staffordshire and London as part of an investigation into a trio of cyber-attacks on the Co-op, Marks & Spencer and Harrods.
