Long before he was the two-hundred-and-second richest person on the planet, Jan Koum was just another curious kid with a wardialer.
Koum, whose net worth suddenly jumped to $6.8 billion last month when his startup WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook,
began his tech career as a teenage immigrant from Ukraine and fan of
the 1995 film ‘Hackers.’ From the privacy of his Mountain View, Calif.
bedroom, he’d use his wardialer—a machine that cycles through phone
numbers, dialing them on a modem to find open connections—to probe the
global Internet and explore faraway networks.
“The Internet was so insecure back then,” he told my colleague Parmy Olson during her reporting for Forbes’ recent cover story on Koum’s $19 billion dollar startup. “Servers on the fringes of the Internet with root account
and no passwords…The challenging part was finding these systems where
you have to learn your way around. There were no manuals.”
Koum says his intentions were never malicious. He was careful not to
delete anything and never participated in the distributed denial of
service attacks that plagued websites in the late 90s by flooding them
with junk traffic. “It was more curiosity, how can I figure it out, more
of a challenge,” he says.
Once, Koum admits, he found his way onto the network of the computer
graphics giant Silicon Graphics, a story that the 38-year-old CEO is
careful to leave unfinished. “At some point I connected to the server,”
he says. “And that’s as much as I’m going to say.”
Add Koum’s name to the growing list of ultra-successful entrepreneurs
whose paths to billions started on the wilder side of the hacker
frontier. In fact, founders of Apple AAPL -1.12%, Microsoft MSFT -0.53%,
Facebook and Twitter all flirted with activities that might today be
called illegal hacking before going on to found Silicon Valley’s most
successful companies, a trend worth remembering as the tech world and Washington grapple over how to apply–or restrict–the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
In the late 60s, a teenage Bill Gates and his Microsoft co-founder
Paul Allen, for instance, were caught with unauthorized access to an
administrator account at Computer Center Corporation and even rummaged
through its Dumpster for printouts of source code, according to Allen’s
memoir. In 2004, Zuckerberg used login records on TheFacebook.com to
break into the email accounts of Harvard Crimson reporters, according to reporting by Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey got his first job by breaking into the
network of the dispatch company he hoped would hire him to show the
company its security vulnerabilities.
Jan Koum’s hacking adventures played a similar role in his unlikely rise from welfare to a top spot on the most recent Forbes billionaire list released earlier this month.
Koum was a noted member of the 1990s hacker group w00w00, which also
included Napster co-founder Sean Fanning and, occasionally Napster
co-founder and Facebook investor Sean Parker. Gordon “Fyodor” Lyon
remembers Koum as a vital contributor to the development of the Nmap
security scanner, a tool used today by both attackers and defenders of
networks to suss out vulnerabilities. “He was particularly helpful in
training Nmap to recognize FreeBSD machines,” Lyon writes to me in an
email, referring to a common open-source operating system. “We lived
nearby and used to hang out from time to time. This tremendous WhatsApp
success truly could not have happened to a nicer person!”
When Koum was working at Yahoo! years later, it was the same w00w00
crowd that he turned for advice in fending off an unprecedented denial
of service attack hitting the company’s websites, according to Reuters’ Joseph Menn.
And when his startup WhatsApp was acquired for a shocking $19 billion
dollars in February, the same group of hackers assembled for a
spontaneous celebration, Menn reports.
Career paths like Koum’s should be taken as evidence of how
prosecuting harmless young hackers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act can hamper innovation, says Hanni Fakhoury, an attorney with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. “[The CFAA] is definitely creating a
chilling effect on researchers, tinkerers and innovators,” says
Fakhoury. “At the EFF, we get phone calls weekly from researchers who
have an idea, have done some preliminary testing, and want to look
deeper but are worried about CFAA liability. The volume of those calls
has gone up.”
Fakhoury points to the case of Aaron Swartz, the coding prodigy,
activist and early employee of the social news site Reddit. Swartz was
prosecuted under the CFAA in 2011 after using an automated script to
download millions of files from the academic journal website JSTOR.
Facing seven-figure legal bills and decades in prison, the 26-year-old
committed suicide. His story is told in a soon-to-be-released documentary titled “The Internet’s Own Boy.”
“Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Wozniak, Paul Allen, all have
told stories or written in autobiographies about how when were younger
they engaged in legally questionable activities, and how they used those
mostly harmless experiences to create the biggest tech companies in the
world,” says Fakhoury. “They were fortunate that they were spared the
fate of Aaron Swartz.”
No one, perhaps, has better captured the importance of hacker
experimentation for innovation better than the late Steve Jobs, who once
partnered with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to sell “Blue Boxes,”
tools that skirted the phone companies’ security measures to allow free
calls. “If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes,” Jobs told his biographer
Walter Isaacson before his death, “There would have been no Apple.”
And if there had been no wardialer, there may have never been Whatsapp.
www.forbes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment