Ytcracker Songs
Victoria Steigerwald
YTC:I was really into the bulletin board scene, locally. I think from there is kinda where I started reading a lot of texts; text files, textzines, and sort of the tales of the underground and got real fascinated with tone phreaking and hacking and stuff, sorta being a natural extension to the understanding how computers worked.
YTC:Yeah, I just kind of really got addicted to the real breaking [00:05:00] into stuff. I just kinda went on this little bit of a rampage, I guess, after that. I hacked pretty much every school district in the state.
JACK:At this point, YTCracker was really into computers, using them to make music with other people and to hack stuff, too. Being part of the demo scene sometimes blended right into the hacker scene because a lot of apps that were used to play pirated games had cool little graphics and music built into the app to say this game was cracked by our hacker group which made the hacker group so much cooler.
JACK:Yeah, so America Online or AOL was a way to get online in the 90s but it was designed for dummies to use the internet. So, because it was so super-easy to use, it attracted a lot of newbies to the internet. In some IRC chatrooms, this meant AOL users were easy targets to try to hack. YTCracker was finding ways to hack into AOL servers and look up information on their users.
HOST:He came to the attention of DCIS when he illegally accessed a defense contract management agency web server. Once inside, he replaced DCMA information with text and graphics in which he bragged about his exploits. The pattern was repeated on over forty websites including servers maintained by NASA. Agents from DCIS, NASA, as well as the FBI began to close in on the juvenile. Meanwhile, police in Colorado Springs were conducting their own investigation. They were tracking down an individual who had hacked into local school records. The minor responsible for the defacements was soon identified and agents began to build their case. YTCracker knew they were onto him.
JACK:At some point he realized online pharmacies were also paying very well for referrals. So, he started sending spam trying to get people to buy medications from certain pharmacies. Then he also found sites that you could buy fake diplomas from. They were also paying well for referrals.
Ya after that came out, some spammers took a big hit, going to prison and getting hit with millions of dollars in fines.Ytcracker had to learn how to keep low and out of trouble while continuing to spam. Becaue honestly, major companies spam us all day long, and they do it legally. So it was just a matter of making smart business choices. And with his years of background in doing this, he was really good at it. And he was able to even legitimize this whole business. Incorporating it, claiming the income on taxes and stuff.
JACK:Huh. That makes me think; are people who make music for video games also nerdcore musicians? [MUSIC] I mean, shoot, some of the rappers here are taking video game sounds and putting them in their songs, so maybe. Well, Ohm-I was really into video games and computers at the time which he says in one of his songs sort of made him different. [MUSIC]
[MUSIC] [01:05:00] I went and worked at a social media platform that we all know and have probably used at some point. I worked on building threat systems for them. Our goal was to be able to find any malware that was spreading or communicating across the platform and then sandbox it, pick it apart programatically, figure out what it was doing, siphon out indicators and then build new signatures and put it all on our compute and fabric storage, and then programatically associate it with any other families. Then we could put detections and filtering in place to stop future campaigns and alert victims that were on the platform.
JACK:Dual Core has done some collaborations with other nerdcore rappers, but not all nerdcore rappers are hackers. Like we were saying before, some nerdcore rappers talk about video games and some talk about anime. But in order for Dual Core to collaborate with others, he created a file-sharing system on a server that he set up. However, he set it up using SCP which is a secure file-transfer method but it takes a couple steps to set up.
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