The Committee to Nuke Elysium

“Someone also swatted my house,” he tells me, smiling. “It happens a lot to me. Well, the SWAT team was only once at my house, but lots of time with the local police department.” Swatting is a vicious prank where a hacker uses an internet call system to report a hostage situation, which scrambles local law enforcement to the victim’s doorstep.

“Through AOL, you can use AT&T Relay to call the SWAT. It’s for handicapped people. You have to sign up, but it’s easy to sign up. You just instant message the username AT&T Relay and then 911. They ask what’s your location, the emergency. That’s what they did to me. That’s what they did to my school too, because there’s less ways of getting caught.”

Cosmo shrugs at this, like it’s all perfectly normal stuff for a teenage boy. And the thing is, in 2012, it is perfectly normal for a bored teenage boy on the edge of delinquency. Instead of egging cars and swinging bats at mailboxes, he’s breaking into e-mail accounts.

Cosmo got into hacking via online gaming. He grew up on Xbox, and played others online competitively. One day, he was knocked offline mid-match, forfeiting the game. He discovered that this was done via a simple trick, where one gamer turns a script on his opponent’s IP address. He began using this same tactic himself. It was easy and required nothing more than off-the-shelf programs, like Cain and Able. It was a veil lifted.