The Hacking Team Defectors
I am sitting in a nondescript all-white office room in Sliema, a touristy, commercial town that faces Malta’s capital of Valletta. I’m staring at my computer, typing commands into the terminal, and I have no idea what I’m doing.
Sitting across the room there’s a hacker who looks nothing like the image of a hacker that popular culture has ingrained in our minds. He has a buzz-cut, he’s clean-shaven, has an earnest smile, and is wearing a dark blue polo shirt and cargo shorts. He looks more like a tourist than someone who used to develop spyware for the infamous Italian surveillance tech company Hacking Team.
He is sending me a bunch of commands written in the Python programming language, trying to exploit a flaw in my MacBook’s operating system, so that I can get administrative privileges on my work computer.
“Let me write another backdoor,” he says.
