SEELEY LAKE – On the evening of March 9 a crowd of more than 40 people packed into the Grizzly Claw Trading Company for Alpine Artisans' Open Book Club hosting of author Jeremy Smith. The presentation, Smith's third for OBC, featured his latest book, "Breaking and Entering: The Extraordinary Story of a Hacker Called Alien." Smith's book traces "white-hat" (i.e., good) hacker Alien from her MIT college days to her present position as CEO of a 30-person "penetration testing agency" hired by banks, retail stores, and even the government on occasion, to find flaws in their physical and cyber security systems.
After briefly explaining how he came to know Alien and to write her story, Smith read two passages from the book. The first revealed Alien's participation in an MIT sub-culture noted for "pulling hacks." Famous past hacks included such pranks as assembling a full-size police car on top of the university's dome in the dead of night or turning the windows of a university's building into a lit up, working Tetris game. While taking computer classes, Alien was also learning how to pick locks, walk on narrow ledges, climb inside chimneys, dodge guards and other practical skills.
The second passage Smith read described Alien's success in stealing a laptop computer from one of the executive offices of a high security bank. The feat involved none of those skills learned out-of-classroom at MIT but rather "social engineering," i.e., manipulating people to get them to do what you want.
Those skills, added to her computer training and a basically ethical mindset, led to the career Alien carved out for herself as CEO of one of the premier good-guy hack tanks.
The story is biographical, but Smith chose to write it as a non-fiction thriller in the persona of Alien. The method lends immediacy and excitement to the book, but also leaves it open to questions of veracity. In fact, Smith added a Frequently Asked Questions pullout on his website to assure skeptical readers that everything in the book is true.
One of the first questions that came up in the discussion session following Smith's reading was "What kind of research did you do for this book?"
Smith replied, "Part of it was tons of interviews with her [Alien], but also I interviewed almost every living person mentioned in the book and I went to all the major sites. So I went to MIT and I got some folks I won't identify to give me a hacking tour. That meant going through the escape tunnels, that meant going through the underground passages, that meant going a little bit on the rooftops, and indeed, I got on top of that great dome at MIT – and it's terrifying [but also] this amazing rush! You just have this amazing view of Boston and the skyline and this sense of ownership like you can imagine hackers have when they take this computer or whatever. And you just feel like Spiderman."
Smith also described going to huge hacker conventions and to "hacker summer camp" which has different villages set up – one that teaches lock-picking, another car hacking, another network forensics, another encryption, etc. He also went to Los Alamos to orient himself to one of Alien's capers there, and even got someone to take him on a motorcycle to mimic some of her motorcycle escapades.
Also important to Smith was having Alien read sections to verify what he had right and tell him what he had wrong in terms of her thoughts and feelings. He noted one of the things that made writing the story harder was that he had to change identifying details.
Smith said, "She never wanted me to change anything to make her look better or take out embarrassing or painful parts of her life. She just said you can't identify clients in a specific way – like which airline is it, which state agency, those kinds of things."
The problem of keeping Alien's own identity private was another issue making the book hard to write. Smith said right up to publication Alien was uncertain as to what level she wanted to be identified. Alien is her real hacker name, and there were people in the computer world who knew that. Others knew there were very few women in the hacker world at that time, which would make it relatively easy for them to trace the adventures in the book and deduce her identity.
Smith said right after the book was published, Alien decided to come out and own it, rather than try to keep her identity hidden. Since that decision, she has become publicly identified, has done some book events with Smith and even did an interview on the Today Show. [hint: she lives in Missoula and can be easily found with a judicious google search.]
Another audience question was how the book and Alien's subsequent identity reveal had impacted her life.
Smith replied, "She was really nervous about having her mom read it. She was like, will you go to dinner with me and my mom and tell her about this?" Smith did and reported her mother said, "What – you didn't do anything like this!" And Alien would answer, "Yeah mom, I did. Um, I have to go to the bathroom now." Smith said he just looked at her mom and said, "Yeah, your daughter is a badass!"
In a more serious vein, he said the book impacts her business both positively and negatively. On one hand, there is value in having the business be top secret; on the other hand, there's a value to having people know that the business exists and has an excellent reputation. Another aspect is that more and more businesses are seeing the need for penetration testing and so white hat hackers are beginning to come out of the shadows.
Smith sees this as a good thing. He said, "There is this whole world of white hat hackers that are taking things apart to see how they can be broken into. If those people can come out of the shadows and we can speak to them and hear from them and respect them and not be afraid of them, they are our best line of protection and insight into the [technological] world that we're otherwise embracing and the institutions that we rely on."
The final audience question was about the possibility of converting the book into a film. Smith hinted at an upcoming meeting and said, "Wish me luck!"
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