Twilight Of The Hackers

No More Shortcuts. It’s Time to Win the Real Way.

- Virginia Heffernan

 I VIRGIL GRIFFITH discovered the allure of hacking in 1993, while slumped at an Intel 80386 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was 10, and he was on a losing streak at Star Wars: X-Wing. To hit the leader board, he’d need a fleet of ace wingmen, but he only had one X-Wing fighter that could hold its own in the game’s World War I– style dogfights. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Digging around in the game’s code, Griffith found that each pilot had its own file, so he cloned his good fighter. Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste—fully 20 times. This gave him, he told me years later, “a plentiful supply of the best wingmen from then on.” Players without Griffith’s workaround were out of luck.

Those brave pilots, gouged from the game’s code, seemed to serve as Griffith’s guardian angels in the next few years, during which he lived by the hacker’s creed: Enlightened cheating is the highest form of gameplay. You don’t beat the TIE fighters. You beat the game itself.

While in college at the University of Alabama, Griffith discovered a chink in the ID card system that let students cadge cafeteria meals. In 2007, shortly after graduating, he invented Wiki- Scanner, a service that exposed the IP addresses and ideological biases of anonymous Wikipedia edits. (In one case, he revealed that people from offices in the US Senate were trying to fix their reputations, where others from Diebold, the company that made insecure voting machines, were using Wikipedia for corporate propaganda). He was on his way to black-hat status—and the circle of Julian Assange—when he discovered something even better than hacking: science.