B00A3OGH1O EBOK

by Wong, Allen

  The first website, “Hackshop”, was the website link that I had posted on all the GunBound forums that “WhiteRabbit” frequented. On the forums, I was asking if people knew if this “Hackshop” website was legit or not. I would also then go on another computer and use a different screen name on those forums to reply that the hacks are real and that the website was legit. This was partially true, because I really did set up an e-commerce website to sell the GunBound hacks that I had previously kept to myself (e.g. the unlimited lightning strikes, and gravity/wind modifier). I was able to create the e-commerce website fairly quickly, because I had already coded an e-commerce website when I was selling my GunBound gold hack. It was just a matter of changing the interface so that it wouldn’t look like my old shop.

  On the “Hackshop” website, I had posted screenshots from a hacker named “yyy” using the available hacks. I also linked to the “yyy” blog using a link titled, “See more screenshots”. This was my way of proving that the hacks were real. The users didn’t know that both the “yyy” hacker and the owner of “Hackshop” were me. On the “yyy” blog, I talked about how the “Hackshop” website was going against the hacker’s ethics of selling hacks for profit. The angered hacker then talked about how he found a hacks-review website called “HaqBound” that had all the hacks sold by “Hackshop” available for free.

  On the “HaqBound” website, I created a list of hacks that currently worked and didn’t work anymore. I made up some random hacks that didn’t work, and I labeled them as “not working”. I then labeled some of the hacking programs that I was selling on my “Hackshop” website as “currently working”. I also posted a link to download the hacking programs for free. And next to these on the list, was a link to my fourth website, which was a tutorial on how to buy GunBound items at 90% off. I also labeled that hack as “currently working”.

  On that fourth website, I described how I knew someone who had worked at the company who created GunBound. I explained that GunBound employees had a URL to an employee discount shop that they could give to their friends and families so that they could to buy items at a 90% discount. I explained that the URL was password-protected to prevent abuse, but that I had hacked the password. I posted a link to that URL along with the password that gave them access to the employee discount shop. That link actually redirected users to my clone of the official GunBound website. But back then, there was a bug in the browsers that allowed hackers to mask the URL of the website they were linking to by using some fairly simple JavaScript commands. So while the link actually pointed to my clone website, the URL shown in the victim’s browser was the URL to the official GunBound website.

  The clone of the GunBound website was used to “phish” for passwords. As explained earlier, it was a skill that I had learned from people “phishing” on Neopets. What happened was that when people tried to log into the “employee discount shop” using their actual GunBound login information, they would unknowingly email me their username and passwords. And to make the shop look more legit, I edited some actual artwork from the game so that I could use them to decorate the employee discount shop’s login page. And to make the shop seem even more legit, I made users enter the employee’s password to grant them access to the shop. Obviously this made-up password worked, because I coded the whole cloned website.

  After setting up this elaborate bait and trap, all I had to do was hope that WhiteRabbit would see it and fall for it. Each one of the websites I created played a role in convincing WhiteRabbit to enter his username and password. For example, “Hackshop” was a spin-off of the original shop I had to sell my gold hacks. I knew that WhiteRabbit hated these shops for whatever reason that may be. I created this hacker named “yyy” as a person WhiteRabbit could relate to. This hacker also hated “Hackshop” and recommended users go to the “HaqBound” website to get hacks for free. I knew that WhiteRabbit wanted hacks for free, because he frequented a lot of forums that discussed GunBound hacking. The purpose of “yyy” was to build WhiteRabbit’s trust in the “HaqBound” website by personally recommending it. By putting working hacks in the “HaqBound” website, I further built WhiteRabbit’s trust on the website. Many people started sharing the HaqBound website and saying how good it was. I never personally recommended HaqBound on the forums myself, because I was a new user to the forums, and usually people don’t trust links given by new users. That’s why I had to make the other established and trusted users on the forums post links to the HaqBound website for me. My plan worked, and soon everyone trusted the HaqBound website. Once I had that trust, it was easy to convince people that an employee discount shop actually existed, and they trusted me enough to follow the tutorial written on another blog. By putting the discount shop tutorial on another blog, I had shifted the blame away from HaqBound. That way, when the more veteran hackers realized that the discount shop was a phishing scam, they wouldn’t put the blame on HaqBound. I could not lose people’s trust in HaqBound or else WhiteRabbit might not visit the website himself. I also had to defend the reputation of HaqBound on the forums by replying to the whistleblowers who tried to expose the phishing scam. I said that the discount only worked for certain users and that while it worked for my older accounts, it did not work for my new ones. It was just a matter of time before HaqBound got exposed, so I was praying that WhiteRabbit would fall for the trap soon.

  Finally, after three weeks, and more than a thousand phished accounts later, I had finally got WhiteRabbit’s GunBound username and password. He realized that it was scam and changed his GunBound password immediately. But, it was not his GunBound account that I was after. I immediately used his password on his personal blog. From there I found his personal email address. I used his password on his email account and quickly shifted through his emails until I found his real name, home address and phone number from an invoice he received. I also learned almost everything else about the person, such as which school he went to, and which internet provider he used. I was in and out of that email account before he had the chance to change the password.

  So to recap, all I needed was a person’s screen name to get all that information. Let that be a lesson to not use a unique screen name online. And try not to use the same screen name across different websites. Your screen name acts as your unique ID through the internet, and people can trace your web history by searching on that screen name on a search engine.

  By getting WhiteRabbit’s identity, I finally got what I wanted: Reassurance that if this person would do anything bad to my mother, I would know how to find him immediately. Without this reassurance, it was difficult for me to concentrate in class. I was also worried that something had already happened to my mother, and I’d be the one responsible for bringing an evil person to her. My worries didn’t go away until months later, when people started forgetting about the matter. I had tried to delete every bit of evidence of my family’s existence from the internet. I removed all of my parent’s information online, including their home phone number and address. I removed all my public profiles and personal websites. For about a decade after that incident, I had kept a low profile.

  Fortunately, nothing really happened after that. And that’s also what’s great about the internet. It makes people easily distracted. Once your 15-minutes of fame are up, you quickly become old news. People will move onto other things. The same speed that you rush into stardom is roughly the same speed that you’ll rush out of it.

  But be warned that if you stand out, there will always be people trying hard to take you down. They will even dedicate a lot of their free time to do so. The reasoning is not always clear as to why they do it. Perhaps they feel that everyone should be equal and that the idea of you being successful threatens that equality. Perhaps they feel that the only people who become successful are the ones who are greedy and obtain wealth through ill-gotten ways. Whatever the reason is, that’s just the way life is. That’s why you must value your privacy and anonymity immensely. Social networks like Facebook®
are taking away your most precious asset. And they are doing it for their own profits. Keep some mystery in your life. Silence your ego, and don’t be so quick to announce your fortunes.

  For those who are curious as to what happened to WhiteRabbit: A few months after the incident, I felt like I needed to get some revenge for what WhiteRabbit did to my mother. So I took some of my accounts, and sent several GunBound items to WhiteRabbit. Then in each account, I complained to the GunBound employees that someone stole my items. I also took some screenshots of me using hacks and modified them so that it looked like it was WhiteRabbit’s character that was doing the hacking. I then posted the screenshots on my Hackshop website and pretended that I forgot to blur out my account name. I then sent a link to Hackshop to the GunBound employees and complained that a hacker named WhiteRabbit was cheating in the game. The GunBound employees ultimately flagged WhiteRabbit as a hacker and banned his GunBound account.

  Lifehack #17: Don’t conduct businesses that won’t allow you to sleep well at night.

  The entire GunBound business gave me confidence that even an 18-year-old could harness the technology of the internet to become successful. What was also great was that building a website cost only a few dollars. And in some cases, it cost nothing at all. Back then, if you wanted to start a successful business, you had to invest in commercial real estate or rent a store or buy some products first before you could sell them. This new business model of low investment and high returns was what I aimed for. And it was a successful business model that I could apply over and over again to many products.

  The GunBound community was small (users in the thousands) compared to the World of Warcraft® community (users in the millions). For those who don’t know, World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), where you choose a hero and do things with the hero to get gold to buy better equipment or to level up. I figured that if I could create hacks for World of Warcraft instead, I would make way more than what I made when I was selling hacks for GunBound.

  And that became a reality for at least one person. Another hacker/programmer had created a program that would play the game for you, so that you wouldn’t have to do the repetitive and tedious task of killing creatures to earn gold and experience. This program was known to hackers as a ‘bot’ (which is short for ‘robot’). He made a lot of money in a short amount of time by selling that bot for about $25 each. He sold over a hundred thousand copies of them, because a lot of people did not really have the free time to play through the game for hours upon hours to get to the level that they wanted. It was also worth it because you could take the gold you earned from running the bot and sell the gold for real money. This was what a lot of so-called “Chinese farmers” would do. Chinese companies would pay young people in China a few cents an hour to play World of Warcraft and gather gold for them. Those companies would then sell the gold for real money in the black market. This whole underworld economy of online-hacking and MMORPG e-commerce spelled for big money.

  I could have easily gotten into this business. I had written powerful hacks and programs for the game. I wrote a program that would play the game for me as well, and it would help me collect the gold. The great thing was that I wrote the program myself, so it was not detectable by the World of Warcraft game client. The other programmer had the issue of constantly updating his program to keep it working. The company behind World of Warcraft would keep detecting the program and updating its game so that the bot would stop working. This back and forth went on for years until the company finally decided to sue the creator of the bot for violating its copyrights and trademarks. His bot sales ceased, and he was stuck paying the lawyer fees.

  There was another story about how another young hacker had made about a million dollars a month selling his hacks. He bought two Lamborghini®’s (a Twin Turbo Gallardo® and a Murcielago®), but he, too, got shut down, and his high income was suddenly cut off. The sad thing was that he blew through most of his most money by throwing expensive parties and buying depreciating assets, such as his exotic cars. And this is a pitfall for someone who makes a lot of money in a short period of time. They think their high income will last forever, so they start spending money they haven’t made yet.

  The problem with selling shady products is that you’d never know when you will get shut down, sued, or arrested. If I had sold my World of Warcraft hacks, I could have been in the same legal trouble that the other bot creator was in. I knew how much trouble I got from selling my GunBound hacks, and it deterred me from repeating the same mistakes. I remembered how many nights I had trouble sleeping because I didn’t know what kind of bad news I’d get the next day. I was even conditioned to be afraid of the new email alert sound. Every new email I got could have contained bad news.

  This was not a risk worth taking, even if it’d make me millions of dollars. I would never go into a business where I wouldn’t know whether I’d still be free from jail the next day. Just the paranoia alone would have eaten me up. And if the business only caused me to get sued, then it would have devastated me to suddenly lose all of my income. The feeling of losing millions of dollars in a few days would be brutal. It was the kind of drop in income that caused many celebrities to turn to drugs after they failed to make another hit movie or another hit song.

  That’s why I never sold my World of Warcraft hacks. I kept them for myself only. It was tempting to head back down that road where I’d continue selling hacks and making thousands of dollars. But having a clear conscience and the ability to sleep well at night was worth more than money could buy.

  Even in the present, the opportunity to run shady businesses with high income still rears its head every once in a while. I still do not think it is worth it and always turn those offers down. I’ve seen many young people take this route of easy money. Some of them get away with it, but most of them don’t stop until they’ve gotten burned. Sometimes being burned doesn’t equate to just financial losses. Sometimes their reputation gets smeared as well, and people start losing their trust in them. And since it’s hard to erase something from the internet, the damages last for quite awhile once your reputation gets ruined.

  10

  Career Path

  While I technically started web development in my early teens, I never got paid for my work until my late teens. Web development was great, because it combined several skill sets that I wanted to develop. It was a mix of graphics design, coding, and marketing.

  My graphics design skills were a natural talent of mine. Since I was very young, I could draw things in small details with accuracy. It could have been a talent passed on by my father, because he was an excellent artist as well. As I looked at more artwork from other artists, I got a better understanding of what was considered beautiful and what was not. Once you had the eye for that, then graphics design became easier.

  My coding skills were a natural progression from my skills with logic and creative thinking. Those two skills were the reason why I kept scoring in the 99 percentile for national math exams. It was my lack of great memory and my small vocabulary that hampered my overall exam scores and prevented me from attending the top schools. Luckily, the ability to code relied more on logic and creative thinking than on memory. And that’s how I naturally progressed into being a programmer. It was a very effective use of my talents and my weaknesses did not hinder my progression in the field.

  My marketing skills came from a mix of my experiences and my ability to sympathize with others. By always putting myself in the customer’s shoes, I gained a better perspective on how to market my products better. And through experience, I could tell which marketing techniques worked and which did not.

  Through these skill sets, I was able to land a job at my college as a webmaster. I also was paid to code websites for other companies and even for a fraternity once (ZBT). While I had already known HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from developing websites as a teenager, I had to learn how to code in PHP and SQL on my own.

 
; I remembered that when I first interviewed for the job of webmaster at my college, I admitted that I did not know PHP and SQL (skills that they were looking for). I showed them my portfolio of websites done in Flash and JavaScript, and they were impressed enough to give me a chance. I basically had a few weeks to learn enough PHP and SQL to create an entire chemistry department website. So, I used my free time to quickly pick up PHP and SQL. To this day, I’ve never taken a formal class on PHP. And yet, when I took a proficiency test at a head hunting firm, I passed the PHP test with flying colors. This pretty much gave me the confidence to believe that if I were given enough time and educational resources, I could learn and develop in any computer language in a short period of time without ever going to school for it. This confidence later gave me the motivation to learn Objective-C and to create apps when few people knew how to create apps.

  But I didn’t jump into making apps at the beginning of my career. I went the safe route first and got myself a stable job. I was being realistic with myself, because I knew that success will not be achieved by everyone. I had to make sure that there was a safety net under me first before I took the leap of faith.

  Lifehack #18: Have a contingency plan.

  Some people get stuck on the idea that they’re really good at something when they’re only mediocre at best. They’ve lied to themselves (or they’ve been lied to) so many times about how good their talents are, that they start thinking that they can lead a successful career from it.