A snippet from another great read by WIRED:
After a typical sleepless night at his keyboard, 19-year-old Josiah White sat staring at the three flatscreen monitors he’d set up on a workbench in a messy basement storage area connected to the bedroom he shared with his brother in their parents’ house. He was surrounded by computer equipment—old hard drives and a friend’s desktop machine he had offered to fix—and boxes of his family’s toys and Christmas tree ornaments.
For weeks, a cyber weapon that he’d built with two of his young friends, Paras Jha and Dalton Norman, had wreaked havoc across the internet, blasting victims offline in one unprecedented attack after another. As the damage mounted, Josiah had grown accustomed to the thrills, the anxiety, the guilt, the sense that it had all gotten so absurdly out of hand—and the thought that he was now probably being hunted by law enforcement agencies around the world.
He’d reached a state of numbness, compartmentalizing his dread even as he read Bruce Schneier’s doomsday post and understood that it was describing his own work—and now, even as a White House press secretary assured reporters in a streamed press conference that the Department of Homeland Security was investigating the mass outage that had resulted directly from his actions.
Read the whole article on WIRED.