Journalist invites hackers to do their worse with his digital life

The good news for most of us is that the world’s best hackers probably have no interest in making your life miserable. For most of us, learning how to avoid relatively primitive online scams and updating our software regularly is usually enough to make sure we stay safe online.

But if you intentionally invite some of the planet’s most elite hackers to get into your digital life, then simply knowing how to avoid scams is rendered almost entirely redundant. Anyone who has ever watched “Enemy of the State” will know what we’re talking about.

And this is what journalist Kevin Roose did, though he may be regretting doing that now. He invited two groups of sophisticated hackers to see how much they could penetrate his life online. It should be noted that Roose rated his online security practices as very good.

Now, before you start thinking that this Roose guy must be crazy, the hackers he asked were known as “white hat” hackers, meaning they’re actually the good guys. They try and compromise digital security with the goal of improving it, and they agreed that they wouldn’t steal anything belonging to Roose or reveal any of his secrets.

Sponsored Content. Continued below...

One group used purely social engineering techniques – meaning they’d try to trick other people into giving them access without any technical coding methods, while another hacker was allowed to use a more technically orientated approach.

The results were pretty drastic. The hackers using a purely social engineering approach managed to gain access to Roose’s cellphone account within seconds of calling his cellphone provider, as well as locking him out of it.

And perhaps even more disturbingly, the hacker taking a more technical approach boldly claimed he could have made Roose homeless and penniless if he so desired after taking control of all his financial information after luring Roose into installing a fake security certificate.

Roose met with everyone he invited to mess with his life at the recent DefCon conference in Las Vegas for a debrief where they revealed what they had done.

The results were documented in Roose’s mini-documentary here which we recommend watching. And seeing just how easy it was for them to take control of his cellphone account should really be an eye-opener for everyone. Not just for all of us, but for those who manage peoples online accounts as well.

Let us know your thoughts.