The Kids Who Hacked Xbox

[Music] this is David pakur he's 22 years old has shoulder length blonde hair and studies computer science his online names are Xenon and xenoma he's part of the Xbox Community tweaking consoles and creating cheats for games like Halo and Call of Duty right now he has an annoying problem the bumper of his car is broken and the dealer refuses to ship the parts to Canada so he asks his friend Justin who lives in the US if he can order the new bumper to his house they met each other years ago on the internet Justin lives

in Wilmington about an 8 hour drive away David's plan is to drive there get the bumper maybe grab something to eat together and head back home his dad offers to tag along so they can take turns driving they take the family car about an hour later David and his dad get to the border the US border officer checks their passports he's about to wave them through when he sees a strange name on his display what's Xenon the officer asks David flinches that's his online name but why on Earth does it pop up here at the

passport control two figures in dark uniforms approach the vehicle they pull their weapons and tell him to step out of the car David gets arrested he walked right into a trap the thing is David may have done more than tweaking consoles and coding cheats the FBI has been after him for years he's part of a hacker gang that will become to known as the Xbox underground they are responsible for an unprecedented series of cyber attacks on some of the biggest Tech firms on the planet they stole thousands of login credentials heisted the source code of

unpublished games and hacked into confidential us mil milary simulations they didn't do it on behalf of some government agency sometimes they didn't even make money with it they were just a bunch of teenagers [Music] [Music] this entire story is based on the fabulous wired article and a double episode of the highly recommendable podcast darket Diaries you'll find the links in the description David was always destined to become a hacker he's still an elementary school when he builds his own little web browser he simply teaches himself how to code in 2001 David's World and that of

countless other kids changes forever the OGX box is released uh for the first time let me now unveil Xbox back then the Xbox marks a technological Milestone a bunch of high-end Hardware packed into a massive black casing the black and green dashboard and the ridiculously oversized controller kind of give off nuclear reactor Vibes it's a completely new aesthetic at the time David gets one and hopelessly falls in love with Halo but he's not just a passionate gamer he's fascinated by the Xbox's Tech he becomes part of the fast growing online community of like-minded nerds they

crack their consoles and get their own software running they stream music install Linux and even manage to boot up Nintendo games David is extremely talented and quickly gains Credit in the scene he starts writing programs for Halo that let you tweak the physics or even the weather in the game then in 2005 the Xbox 360 drops and changes everything again Microsoft learned from its mistakes and bolstered the console security to hack the new Xbox you need a development kit that's a special console with extra features just for Developers these Dev kits are incredibly hard to

get developers need to be verified by Microsoft to have one for everyone else they're strictly off limits it takes a while but eventually a few Dev kits start popping up online someone has found thousands of them at a Recycling yard Microsoft must have tried to trash them but now someone is making money by selling them in 2008 David acquires several of these Dev kits for himself and resells a few this is how he meets Justin may his buddy from Wilmington online Justin goes by mtw the devkit gives David access to partnernet a closed platform where

Xbox developers upload test versions of their games he spends his night scouring partner net posting screenshots of unreleased games and making a name for himself in online forums he starts showing up late to school his grades are slipping but he thinks what if this is my ticket to a career in game development in 2010 David catches the attention of a guy named Dyan wheeler Dylan is 14 and lives in Perth Australia he has long brown hair and is in the middle of puberty he loves a good thrill and got into hacking early on in high

school Dylan got suspended for hacking into the school's network but he doesn't like to be told what to do so he hacked the network again and got suspended again he is fascinated by what David and others are doing with the Xbox and wants in on the action so he signs up to the Xbox hacking form his online moniker is super day that same year 2010 another Xbox 360 dev kit ends up in the hands of sonad NWA sad is 24 lives in Washington New Jersey and is a True Tech Enthusiast he started gaming by 8

by 12 he was taking AP part in Tire consoles his room is packed with electronics his desk is covered by a soldering iron an oscilloscope and all sorts of electronic parts he dives into the Xbox scene and calls himself Sonic it's an incredibly exciting time for David Justin Dylan sonat and many others partner net is an absolute gold mine they get to play new games months before their release completely free of charge but at some point they start getting into trouble with real developers on the platform in 2009 David finds a way to use cheats

for the brand new Call of Duty game he sets up a server and charges users for using his cheats $100 per 30 minutes players can walk through walls and fire without ever missing a shot the cheap business is a huge success David quickly makes up to $8,000 a day he takes his girlfriend to fancy restaurants and stays in luxury hotels Activision the developer behind Call of Duty catches wind of David scheme they send him cease and desist letters and threaten to sue but David doesn't respond they're just video games he thinks it's not like he's

hacking into servers and stealing information well not yet the Xbox underground story is so insane it would definitely deserve its own website you know who also deserves their own website you a portfolio site is a great way to present yourself and your skills there are many tools to accomplish just that but none quite like udo's website builder start by setting up the structure of your site add pages and features choose your color palette and pick your theme then simply drag and drop blocks to add content like your recent work you can customize each block add

images animations Etc no need to worry about text either Udo has integrated chat GPT to assist you with any copyrighting it really couldn't be easier and everything looks polished and works like a charm you also get a custom domain free for the first year along with unlimited hosting and support and Udo is so much more an all-in-one management platform that helps you manage all your business needs Under One Roof so when your business grows udo's got tons of apps to help like CRM sales and marketing check out Udo at fern. dealo and start building your

own website for free one night Dylan gets a message from an online friend named gamer freak 172 7 it contains a list of usernames and matching email addresses and passwords all taken from a form run by game developer epic games at the time epic is mostly known for unreal tournament and Gears of War Dylan checks the list and finds the login credentials of an IT employee at epic games he wonders if that person uses the same password on other sites he tries to log in the employees Gmail account and it works he comes to the

Inbox and finds another password admin 060606 it gives him access to an internal Network at Epic Games Dylan sends David a message to tell him about his find David is hooked what are the servers are hosting unreleased games he knows that what they're doing is illegal so he sets himself some limits no looking at customer data or credit card information he's only interested in the games David and Dylan spend months rumaging through the Epic servers on the hunt for anything interesting and sure enough they eventually find something an early build of Gears of War 3

complete with source code they can't believe their luck they're on the verge of playing one of the most anticipated games of the year months before anyone else they message sonad to let him in on their Discovery he has a hacked modem at home that lets him cover up his IP address so he can download the game without getting caught sonad logs into epic's Network and grabs the files it's hundreds of gigabytes of data he stays up all night until the download finally completes he's too excited to go to sleep he burns the data onto eight

Blu-rays and mails them to David he writes the words wedding videos on the package David receives the package and tries the game the build is still pretty raw a lot of the textures are missing it's not really playable at this stage David sends the game to the others including Justin just a few days later the game appears online as a public download the leak makes headlines everywhere last week Gears of War 3 was leaked on the web gears developer epic games confirmed that this is not the final build of the game and warned people that

downloading the title may actually melt your system not sure if that's true but Scare Tactics aside don't pirate pirating sucks the guys are still snooping around the epic games Network when they stumble upon a very unsettling email epic games has called the FBI because of the leak but it seems the feds are not on to them yet David is freaking out he asks Justin to help him cryp his hard drives sonad decides to lay low and wait for things to calm down Dylan however doesn't care about the FBI he keeps logging into the servers while

the feds are actively scanning them to find the hackers his ballsiness pays off Dylan finds a USB drive connected to the network and on that drive he finds a list of all the company's important access credentials Dylan now has full access to epic's network from that point on he logs into the network every single day he roams around the PCS of Epic employees and TPS their webcams he sits at his computer in Australia and watches them in real time while they move around the office or sit in meetings he mostly exploits human errors he searches

data breaches for login credentials and then tries them on other sites eventually he manages to also hack into the network of other companies Dylan is on a serious hacking spree David and sonad find out what he is doing and jump back in they just can't resist one by one they hack the networks of tech giants like Microsoft EA bunge blizzard valve and Activision they keep digging deeper and deeper downloading more and more unreleased games it's like a fever [Music] dream the guys have been hacking their way through the gaming industry for almost a year now

from time to time they're also making money off of it David starts selling the jacked and unreleased games to a user called Xbox Dev guy the contact is established via Justin but deep down they're still just a bunch of gaming fans they invite their friends over to show their new video games they never reveal where they get them from they're a small and tinic group but they can't always keep the excitement to themselves elves so every now and then word gets out to The Wider scene and every time that happens new people want in on

the action two new faces join the group Austin alala is a 16-year-old high school student from a cordsville Indiana he's tall rather shy and reserved online he goes by AA monkey the second newbie is Nathan laru an 18-year-old from Bowie Maryland his dad works as a diesel mechanic and his mom is busy homeschooling him Nathan has written a program to fake FIFA coins and dreams of becoming a proper game developer someday online he calls himself anime freak the group expands their hacking activities and their virtual break-ins move further and further away from gaming AMD Intel

Disney Warner Brothers and Google they end up infiltrating the servers of almost 25 companies all of them major corporations a late summer evening in 2012 Austin and Nathan are poking around the servers of zombie Studios a developer known for war games like the spec op series they discover a tunnel that leads them straight to a US military server the drives host a new game Zombie Studios is working on ah64 D Apache simulator a flight simulator commissioned by the US Department of Defense they hesitate this is bigger than anything they have found so far and much

more dangerous curiosity ends up getting the best of them and they download the game the group is at its peak they've been active for over 2 years they've 've gone places no one else could David Dylan sonad Austin and Nathan have become the core of the group others are Loosely involved in individual hacks altogether they are almost a dozen strong now they're aware that everything that they have done could already land them in jail but they just can't stop they joke about what they would call their gang in prison Xbox underground sounds pretty badass they

think they laugh at the idea but not for much longer Justin aktw was an early member of the group he met David when he bought the Xbox 360 dev kit from him a few years ahead of the epic games hack Justin was directly involved in many of their operations a few days before Gears of War 3 was leaked Justin got the game from the others in the group some of them like sonad suspected that he was the one who put it on line Justin is almost 3 years older than David but compared to him he's

a lot less cautious in 2010 Justin attends PAX East a video game convention in Boston he gets calls from sonad and a few others in the group they ask him if he can hack into one of the networks on site maybe he'll find something interesting no big deal if not Justin gives it a try but doesn't find a breach to exploit the network is too secure he's not ready to give it up though he walks around the convention center and finds the stand of a small developer called Atomic Games they're showcasing a new shooter called

breach Justin Waits until one of the employees heads to the bathroom then he sneaks behind the stand and secretly tries to download the game onto his laptop but the employee comes back sooner than expected at just 14 megabytes Justin has to cancel the download and make a run for it two Atomic employees chase after him and quickly catch him they take him to the police during the arrest Justin tries to bribe the officers he offers them $100 if they let him go during the interrogation he openly admits he was trying to steal the game he

repeatedly tells the cops that his names of people bigger and more important than himself when the others hear about the arrest they get suspicious what if Justin has been talking to the cops he loses their trust he disappears for a while but eventually gets back in touch trying to regain their trust now he is scamming companies like Cisco Microsoft and Lenovo with a return fraud scheme someone like that couldn't possibly be working with the cops some in the group like David and Dylan are thinking others like sonad remain skeptical after some time Justin manages to

get back on board back to August 2012 David and Dylan are poking around Microsoft servers they come across a folder that seems pretty well protected looks like only a few developers have access to it maybe the company is working on some super secret project they think they download the folder and find a bunch of technical documents some picks of circuit boards and casings source code all that kind of stuff they wonder what all of this could be for and they quickly piece it together they found the plans for the upcoming Xbox console code name Durango

it'll later be called the Xbox one they Ponder what to do with the plans they could sell them to others or they could try to build the console themselves all parts seem to be available on the market they order the parts online and have everything shipped to Nathan's house he volunteers to assemble the gaming console and it works the group now has a working prototype of the new Xbox but no games to test it with so they decide to sell it they find a buyer in the SE shell who's willing to pay $5,000 the buyer

transfers the money and the group discusses who's going to ship the console to him Justin steps up he offers to take it to the post office the group agrees Justin drives from Delaware to Bowie about a 2-hour ride and picks up the console at Nathan's place but the package never makes it to the SE they start to get nervous what if the FBI has intercepted the package after the sale falls through Dylan decides to upload the pictures of their prototype online just to see what happens he doesn't consult with the others that means the Xbox

prototype is now seemingly publicly up for auction on eBay by now Dylan is already known for his impulsive actions in early 2012 he got drunk called epic games and confessed to hacking their servers he explained to the employees over the phone how he did it and asked for a poster as a reward he actually got one this time things get even worse the eBay auction goes viral in no time bids reach over $20,000 but the sale doesn't go through because Microsoft files a copyright claim Dylan who set up the auction under his online name super

day starts giving online interviews we have uh someone who's gotten pretty world-renowned over the past couple of weeks here I'm just going to go straight to the to the chase here his name is Dylan uh most people probably know him by his moniker super day uh he's gotten himself into a little bit of trouble with uh Microsoft and uh trying to I guess he's uh taking the hacking Community by storm uh Dylan welcome to the show oh ni sonad and David are pissed at Dylan really pissed after leaving trac's all over the Internet this kind

of attention is the last thing they need David cuts off all ties with Dylan the only ones even more pissed are the people at Microsoft the investigation picks up speed just weeks after the auction the FBI raides Nathan's AKA anime freak's house and arrest him sonad nwat AKA Sonic tries to distance himself from the group but his house gets rated to he sends a copy of the search warrant to others in the group including Dylan Dylan then posts the name of the agents who raided son's house online he publicly threatens to send Hitman after them

a statement he later regrets and in February 2013 Dylan wheeler also known as super day is finally arrested by Australian authorities Austin has learned from Nathan how to fake FIFA coins and turn it into a business Justin is involved in scams of his own both of them lay low for a while David also keeps a low profile in Canada after he learns about the string of arrests well at least until he gets a chance to snag an actual prototype of the new Xbox David is at a concert when he gets a call from Austin Austin

tells him about an 18-year-old hacker named Armen AKA Armen the Cyber Armen claims to have access to Microsoft campus and offers them a deal he will sneak in and steal a real Durango prototype in exchange for some Microsoft server credentials and a few thousand David thinks Armen is nuts but again his curiosity gets the better of him and he agrees at 9:00 p.m. Armen drives his car to Microsoft campus he's wearing a sweater with the company logo and carrying a big backpack he's cloned some employees access card and has no trouble getting in the premises

are enormous but Armen knows his way around by now for almost a year he has been frequently sneaking into the buildings and dreaming of what it would actually be like to work there he is a huge fan of Microsoft he even applied for a job but is not heard back yet Armen enters one of The Office Buildings he's nervous he's been there many times but never to steal anything there's still a few people around whenever he hears footsteps approaching he hides he eventually finds what he's looking for in one of the open plan offices on

the third floor his hands are shaking as he stuffs three Xbox prototypes into his backpack he sneaks out of the building leaves the premises and drives back home he sends two of the consoles to David and Austin and keeps one for himself just a week after his Breakin Armen gets a it's Microsoft they reviewed his application he's got the job it's a dream come true but only a couple of weeks later Arman loses the job surveillance cameras have caught him stealing the prototypes he's taken into custody in January 2014 aen alala AKA AA monkey is

arrested at his house by four FBI agents in March David pakora xenom Mega gets arrested at the US border David sonad Austin and Nathan stand trial together in the US meanwhile on the other side of the globe Dylan is also facing charges the group is accused of identity theft fraud and conspiracy to steal millions of dollars worth of intellectual property the indictment is extremely detailed the FBI must have been building the case for a long time there are chat logs and transcripts of personal conversations dating back to the first epic games hack in 2011 in

court prosecutors even play audio recordings that must have been secretly made during their hacking sessions but the funny thing is I still have access to all their computers cuz I signed in yesterday he knowingly logs into epic knowing that that that's CH there what do you mean like he in the emails like they were emailing uh FBI people and he knows that they talk to each other but he still manages to not care I have to the US military I have to the Australian Department of Defense I have every single big company Intel AMD Nvidia

Google Microsoft Disney War Brothers everything the indictment repeatedly mentions person a person a provided most of the evidence for the FBI person a allegedly helped David encrypt his hard drive and sell unreleased games to a user named Xbox Dev guy person a is also said to have delivered a self-made prototype of the new Xbox to the FBI I get a copy of the indictment and I start reading about person a from Wilmington Delaware we all only knew one person from Wilmington Delaware Justin Justin all signs point to him being an informant of the FBI did

he cut a deal with the police after the incident at the convention is that how he got away with all of his scams no one knows for sure the guys in the US plead guilty they all have very different ways of coping with the conviction David is cooperative he helps the investigators understand how they bypass the systems of billion-dollar corporations the officers are pretty impressed by the 23-year-old skills he spends 18 months in prison after getting out he finishes his college and starts working for cyber security firms Austin gets 3 years probation he doesn't serve

a single day in jail because he agrees to help the FBI with another fraud case involving fake FIFA coins he later becomes the head of cyber security at a social media startup sonad serves the same sentence as David 18 months he too gets out but the following years are very hard on him he starts working at a vape store and goes to college but his probation officer bans him from using a computer and constantly harasses him everything that I would ever ask her would always be a no like for example like I would want to

go down and see you know my sister in Virginia or something and it's no you know it could be she would come up with the craziest reasons to why she wouldn't let me do anything sonad became more and more isolated and eventually slips into depression seeing no prospects for himself he turns to drugs his probation officer sees this as a violation of his probation terms she drags him before a judge who sentences sonad to another 9 months behind bars in 2019 son's probation for a second sentence ends and for the first time in years he's

allowed to use a computer he's now clean and living with his [Music] sister Nathan is terrified of having to go to jail he is one of the youngest in the group and a gentle person of all of them he was the least involved in the hacks Nathan applies for bail until the verdict is final he gets an ankle monitor and is allowed to stay with his parents but the thought of what awaits him in prison eats him up one day he cuts off the ankle monitor and tries to flee he pays a friend to drive

him to the Canadian border but the police catch him at the border checkpoint Nathan panics he jumps out of the car and runs across the bridge towards the Border but the cops catch him he's desperate and considers jumping off the bridge then he pulls out a knife and injures himself until he collapses he survives and is almost immediately taken back to jail this time serving a 2-year sentence shortly before his release Nathan comes out as trans and is now Holly the time in prison must have been awful just a year after the release Holly takes

their own life in Australia Dylan is the only one who pleads not guilty this leads to a series of court cases that drag on for over three years I guess I pled not guilty to the sense that they they tried to hit me with everything when it wasn't everything that I did at the start they put a lot of false charges on me Dylan is ordered to surrender his passport but instead he heads to the airport and flies to the Czech Republic he has Czech citizenship because his mother is from there shortly after Dylan's mother

is sentenced to 18 months in prison for aiding his Escape Dylan claims that his mother neither drove him to the airport nor sent him money yeah it's it's kind of the harsh reality of everything you know someone's got to go down for something Dylan moved to the UK where he established a cyber security firm and gave talks on security related topics I'm not hiding because I'm not doing anything wrong I did something when I was a kid when I was a teenager an underage teenager it was wrong I learned from that in March 2020 Dylan

shuts down his company there's been no trace of him since in 2017 when almost all members of the Xbox underground had served their sentences the police finally arrest Justin May the authorities seized a brand new BMW and nearly $440,000 in cash in 2021 he was convicted of fraud fencing tax evasion and money laundering he was sentenced to almost 8 years in prison and fined $4 million