They are hooded cyber criminals in dark basements trying to crack your bank account PIN. They are insidious Russians stealing elections from offshore IP addresses. These are typically what we associate with hackers, but Ryan Montgomery, also dubbed 0day, is different. He is what’s called a white hat hacker, or ethical hacker.
The 29-year-old cyber prodigy from Pennsylvania went from causing mischief online to helping authorities dismantle child predator networks. That shift from dark to light was spurred on by a text message he received from a distressed friend in 2020; but his journey into cyberspace began much earlier. Montgomery began hacking almost in the womb: in the days of Napster and AOL, at age 11.
The web landscape looked far different then. You couldn’t just Google it and go from “zero to hero” mastering cyber skills like today. “It was chat rooms and just who you knew,” Montgomery told The Epoch Times. “Asking questions, and not just asking questions but asking the right questions.” It was having the “mindset of a hacker,” he added, “where you want to take something apart and put it back together and make it do something it wasn’t supposed to do.”
Ultimately, hackers look beyond the graphical user interface, or GUI, to figure out how to exploit a system or software. Where your average user sees only the tools displayed on AOL, for instance, hackers spot less obvious things like peer-to-peer connections, presenting IP addresses ripe to be exploited or attacked. Some have hailed Montgomery the world’s number one hacker.
But his heart was good. He would use his tech-savvy skillset to protect businesses by creating his own cybersecurity firm with his partners. Getting a text from said friend in late 2020, a switch flipped in his brain. And with unbridled fervor, he set about clandestinely dogging a depraved network preying on children. The hacker would have justice.
By Michael Wing
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