For hackers, anonymity was once critical; that’s changing
Ask any hacker who’s been around long enough, and there’s a good chance you’ll hear an archetypal story, tinged with regret, about the first time his or her real identity was publicly disclosed.
After enjoying years of online anonymity, the hacker known as Grifter was unmasked by a less-than-scrupulous spouse. “Hey, Neil!” his wife called out at him, absent-mindedly, from across a crowded room, while accompanying him (for the very first time) at a hacking conference. “My beautiful wife, she outed me in front of the entire hacker community,” he said with a laugh.
Dead Addict’s version of the story involves an employer who pushed him to apply for a patent — for which he was required to provide his full legal name. “The people who later doxxed me,” he said, using a term for publishing private information about someone, usually with malicious intent, “pointed to that patent.”
Nico Sell managed to stay “ungoogleable,” she said, until around 2012, when, acting as chief executive of a secure-messaging company, Wickr, she felt she needed to become more of a public figure — if reluctantly. “My co-founders and I, we all drew straws,” she said, “and that was that.”
I met Grifter, whose real name is Neil Wyler; Dead Addict, who, citing privacy concerns, spoke with me on the condition that I not share his real name; Nico Sell, which, while undeniably the name she uses publicly, may or may not be her legal name; and dozens of other self-described hackers in August at DEFCON, an annual hacking convention — one of the world’s largest — held in Las Vegas.
A lion’s share of the media attention devoted to hacking is often directed at deeply anonymous (and nefarious) hackers like Guccifer 2.0, a shadowy online avatar — alleged to have been controlled by Russian military intelligence officers — that revealed documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee in 2016. And, to be sure, a number of DEFCON attendees,