Rob Juncker is chief product and technology officer at Mimecast. Is he a hacker? “Unequivocally yes,” he says. “And I think every security leader should be able to answer ‘yes’ to that question, for so many reasons.”
He started early, when his parents brought home an Apple IIc. He was 10. They wanted to use it for word processing; but within two days of it arriving he had the lid off, trying to figure out how it worked. He had a driving curiosity to understand it. This curiosity, which he describes more as a thirst for knowledge, started before the arrival of the Apple – but with hands-on access, it rapidly focused on technology.
Back then, especially for a 10-year-old, there were few books and little training available. But it was obvious that what made the Apple do things was software. So, he taught himself Basic programming by looking at the code on the screen and working out what words caused which actions.
“Pretty soon I found myself sitting there with the command prompt and starting to program in Basic. I think that was my first experience of the beauty of computers and electronics in general. Suddenly I was unlocking a world where I could write something and create it. It was like an artist being given a paintbrush for the first time and then realizing that you don’t need to stick within the confines of what’s on the paper in front of you – rather, you create your own canvas and what you can do with it.”
Then came modems. They were just 300 baud in those days but still magic to a new teenager with an Apple. His parents got one; but that wasn’t enough for him – especially after he discovered wardialers. To get the full benefit, he needed his own dedicated phone line for the modem, but his parents refused.
“So, I did what any hacker would do,” he explains – but remember that this was a hacker barely into his teens. “I called the phone company and ordered a phone line to be installed at my house. But the best part of this story,” he added, “is before the scheduled appointment, I was in the basement running laps around my house to get my body temperature high enough to tell my parents that I was sick and couldn’t go to school the next day. When the engineer arrived to do the installation, I was home alone with a forged letter from my dad.”
The forgery would not have been difficult. The family already had a computer being used as a word processor, and the engineer had nothing to verify the signature against. The letter explained that the family wanted a dedicated low-noise line for a modem – and it worked. The youngster expanded his hacking repertoire into successful social engineering – and all because he couldn’t afford the games he wanted and needed to find a different way to access them.
Think about this for a moment. He started when only ten years old. In the space of a year of access to an Apple IIc, he taught himself rudimentary hacking and the ability to code in Basic; and a few years later, he designed, delivered and succeeded with a complex example of social engineering. “I effectively did the first ‘deepfake’: a kid faking his father and ordering a phone line. I had no legal right to do this, but I succeeded in doing it.”
With the modem, he began more serious hacking. “I’ll admit it. I downloaded early samples of pirated software; and that eventually got me into trouble – which I’m completely free of now, by the way!”
By the time he was in his teens he had become more adventurous. He gave an example. “In the early days, SimCity asked you for the population of a city provided on a red sheet (red, so it couldn’t be photocopied) every time you played the game. I was working alongside another hacker to find a way to bypass such controls; so, we’d be working in code and especially assembly. To be honest, I wasn’t the one who solved the problem – it was another member of the group. But it’s an example of the sort of stuff I was trying to do.”
The trouble arrived with the proverbial knock on the door in his early teens.