I was 15 at the time. I was on the internet 24/7 frequenting various communities, back when any "scene" had its own "official" forum.
I was primarily interested in gamehacking and web exploitation. I made a few friends from these communities and we often shared stupid exploits with eachother such as uploading some html file deep in a large corporations file structure and linking it between us for laughs.
My friend messages me one day that he managed to upload a c99 shell on a large website. He linked me to it, but deep within the structure to a plain text database of millions of credit cards.
Fast forward two months later: I'm ratting out every connection I know along with emails/names/info to the police, after they kicked my door down and seized literally every computing device in my house.
Phones, computers, tablets, desktop computers, and my NAS'. It's been 8 years and I have yet to hear from the police and they have dodged my emails, in person visits, and calls every time.
I lost over $10,000 worth of computer equipment. This was my hacker moment.
Pre-internet, early 80s, I had my first computer, a Commodore 64. I was pretty active on the local BBS's and some long distance ones via an open modem relay I discovered at a local General Motors plant while wardialing.
I started using a new service called Quantum Link and hung out with a lot of shady characters that were doing phreaking and credit card number passing.
That's a path I probably would have continued down until one day I received a call from a guy saying he was with the FBI, that they new what I was doing, and were going to be paying me a visit.
Being something like 12, 13 years old, I freaked out and quickly hid all my pirated floppies and took my C=64 down to my friends house to hide it.
After a couple of weeks my patience wore out and I got my system back, but kept my nose clean after that (other than copying software, you couldn't have a C=64 and not trade with friends:).
It was only after four or five years later that I found out that the "FBI agent" was actually a friend of my friend's older brother. Doh! Probably all for the best.
I was primarily interested in gamehacking and web exploitation. I made a few friends from these communities and we often shared stupid exploits with eachother such as uploading some html file deep in a large corporations file structure and linking it between us for laughs.
My friend messages me one day that he managed to upload a c99 shell on a large website. He linked me to it, but deep within the structure to a plain text database of millions of credit cards.
Fast forward two months later: I'm ratting out every connection I know along with emails/names/info to the police, after they kicked my door down and seized literally every computing device in my house.
Phones, computers, tablets, desktop computers, and my NAS'. It's been 8 years and I have yet to hear from the police and they have dodged my emails, in person visits, and calls every time.
I lost over $10,000 worth of computer equipment. This was my hacker moment.