Hacking the mind of a hacker: ET decodes the psychology of a cyber criminal

Alok (name changed on request) is in his early teens, not the age when he should be making thousands of dollars. Alok is a hacker who lives on the dangerous by-lanes of the internet—the dark web. Accessible only through browsers designed to promote anonymity and confuse law enforcement, the dark web is where the nefarious elements of the internet hang out.

The baby-faced Alok has been working with a hacker collective on the dark web for nearly three years now. In those three years, he has been party to several instances of theft and trading, particularly of credit card information, on the dark web and its marketplaces. He was never a leader, but one of the foot soldiers, yet he managed to earn bitcoins that are now worth thousands of dollars. Alok hides his wealth from his parents.

These days, Alok is in the throes of a moral crisis. It may have paid him well, but he is not sure if he wants to continue being what those in the security business calls a black hat hacker—someone who uses his skills for negative, often illegal ends. As he grows up, Alok is going through the realisation of his own power and of the ways in which he can use it.

Meet the hacker
If the mental picture that lights up in your mind when you hear of Alok the hacker is of a young, bespectacled guy sitting in a dark room, with his face lit up by the bluish glow of his computer monitor, you are not too far away from reality. That’s where the journey of most hackers start—staying up in the middle of the night, trying different things, finding and learning new ways to manipulate code and find vulnerabilities.

Like Alok, somewhere along the way, they see a fork on the road, one that could take them towards using their power to make code dance to their tunes for the good, the other that takes them to the direction where they could wreak havoc. It’s 2017 and coding is power and exceptional coders have an inordinate amount of power. Efforts to target cyber installations of ISIS is just one such example.

For most people, the hacker is a mysterious being. There is so little that the person on the street knows about these digital lock-pickers and much of the little they do know has been influenced by how the hacker is portrayed in popular culture.

The term hacker itself has become more complicated over the years. Its usage—alternating between black hat and white hat (the good guys)—means that the meaning oscillates between something of an outlaw in the Wild West of the internet while at the same time conjuring up images of the sheriff of the town as well.

The Hacker mind
Why do hackers, well, hack? It often starts with a need for thrills, for validation. It is not always the money on offer that attracts them to turn rogue; it is a need for the adrenalin rush that comes from breaking impenetrable defences and proving themselves to other hackers. According to several coders I have met, that moment of triumph of knowing of their own power, is something of a crucial rite of passage.

Alok, the young hacker, remembers his first hack, finding a vulnerability in how a startup in Bangalore stored user data and getting a T-shirt as swag from the company after he reached out to them and warned them about it.
The sense of idealism and an overwhelming belief in the power of technology to set right the ills of the society is real and drives many young coders. Hackers tend to have an acute, heightened sense of what is right and what is wrong, and much of their behaviour is based on how they interpret what they see as injustice or unfairness. This heightened sense of social injustice is one of the characteristics that underpins many hackers.

That is what, in particular, leads to the formation of hacktivist collectives like Anonymous which tries to correct what they claim are social or injustices.

Hackers will exert huge influence over our lives as we move towards an even more connected world. Civil society and governments need to invest in understanding them and trying to channelise their power in making the world a better place.

(This article is from our Cyber crime special series 'Dangers of Living in a Connected World' )