📸

Shawn said. “I never really had the desire to break into machines, but the act of securing machines and understanding how at a lower level things worked, for the purpose of making them more secure, was something I was interested in. I kind of found people along the way that were both talented programmers as well as interested in security.”

In his later congressional testimony, Shawn said nothing of his own hacking background—only that he was interested in programming and in listening to music. When Napster was international news, every story missed the fact that Shawn was an aspiring hacker who was at best a gray hat. He wrote programs that took advantage of Unix computer network flaws and bore such unambiguous titles as “faker.c Dalnet Address spoofer,” which allowed electronic correspondents to misrepresent their computers’ locations. “Napscan.c portscanner,” likewise, was a tool for checking computers for open lines to hack through. And “orgasm.c Portscanner/Flooder,” cowritten by Shawn, was a program for denial-of-service attacks, the type that has taken down Yahoo!, eBay, and the federally funded CERT institute for computer security, among other targets.

“That was just silly,” Shawn said when asked about those early programs. “This guy showed me this basic program to connect to a port and send a little bit of data there, so basically I did everything you could possibly do with those functions until I had really learned them inside and out,” he said. “None of that stuff really did anything interesting at all—it’s just silly, really a test program. It was really just my version of ‘Hello, world.’” It’s true that Shawn wasn’t big time, and it’s unclear how many hackers used the programs he put his nickname on. But they were good enough to get him into w00w00.

W00w00 members would go on to populate Napster, BindView Corp., and several other well-known Internet security firms, and the ties among the group prompted some to joke about an Internet mafia and world domination. Before the dot-com boom pulled many of the collaborators away to more profitable uses of their energy, though, it was less like a mob than an unusually diverse social club. “Without w00w00, Shawn and [Jordan] Ritter wouldn’t have met, and Napster might not have taken off,” said group founder Conover, now a computer-security professional in California. “We had completely different sorts of people.”

Around the time that Shawn got involved at w00w00, he graduated

📸