Jesse McGraw isn’t a hacker; at least, not by his own definition. He accepts he was a hacker, and a blackhat hacker, and that he still retains the mindset of a hacker. But he is no longer a hacker, he says.
Early days
He realized he was a hacker while in high school. “My one and only friend was a hacker, and I had never seen anything like what he did.” Before then, McGraw had thought computers were just something used for word processing; a tool that could be used for its intended purpose. Then he saw this person programming in math class.
“He was programming, and I’d never seen anything like that. Then he’s using a tool that he programmed in math class to pivot across the network into some type of protected file system used by the school. And I just thought, ‘What are you doing?’”
That was McGraw’s first introduction into hacking, even though he didn’t understand what it was. “He and I became friends, and the longer I spent around him, the more I began to understand that technology, for want of a better phrase, can be bent to one’s will. It can be circumvented. All the rules can be broken.”
