Leaving the negative image of hacking behind –
maia arson crimew on the meaning and connotations behind hacking.
maia arson crimew (it/she) is a hacktivist originating from Lucerne, Switzerland, who is mainly known for its nofly list hack.
Before this, maia – whose name is actually written in all lower-case – had already gained the general (and legal) attention for its Verkada hack – with the group APT-69420 Arson Cats, maia arson crimew hacked over 150’000 surveillance cameras all over the USA, most of which overlooked jails, schools or big corporations like Tesla.
For maia, hacking goes hand-in-hand with its own political views – with hacking, maia is not only having fun, but also has the feeling that it’s actually doing something for its own ideals.
You can obviously read this story in peace –
but you can also watch it, right here, right now:
Hacking is Trial and Error
For 24-year-old maia, everything around hacking is also a source of one simple thing: Fun! In the end, it’s (almost) just like any other activity. But what are activities without motivations? maia finds its motivation in trying out new things, learning new ways, and crossing its own boundaries.
How far can I go? What are my limits?
But as important as motivation is – you do need to start somewhere.
Again, the key is trial and error. If you woke up today and set yourself the goal of starting your hacking career, then learning the basics should be a good start, says maia. Go ahead and learn some coding and programming – it might not take too long for you to only see bright letters, numbers and symbols.
There are countless “How To Hack Guides” all around the internet, and, well, they might help you. Though, it obviously all depends on what you want to do, who you want to hack, and what your ultimate goal is.
Between Boredom and Little Effort
To the untrained eye, it probably seems like hacking is this immense effort that encompasses your entire life. For maia, though, quite a lot of it stems from boredom – sounds trivial, but maia really doesn’t have the goal to put a lot of effort in its craft.
“I have to allow myself to have fun and not only do the biggest, most serious activism project – it can just be: ‘Oh, I found something funny today, LOL'”
maia usually spends a couple hours of its days scrolling through servers like shodan or jenkins, neither looking for the next big story nor expecting an incredible find. Within the hacking community, this sometimes makes maia unpopular or frowned upon – some people within particular scenes are even under the assumption that maia can’t really hack.
I can reach my goal with the easiest methods, which, apparently, no one has tried yet!
Reaching the goal with as little effort as possible – that’s the way maia works. The best thing? It pays off! maia worked that way with the aforementioned nofly list hack – it stresses that it really only spend a couple of hours on its laptop and never even closed the browser until it found the grand nofly list.
Hacking is More than a Petty Crime
To maia, it is clear as day that hacking is a strong form of activism. After the countless attacks on Swiss government websites, the general opinion on hacking being just some evil deed has rapidly risen to the top of the headlines.
These kinds of portrayals are seldom more than a cheap excuse, says maia. With them, governments and corporations can avoid taking responsibility for not having a good enough security system.
“Instead of just admitting: ‘yeah, we fucked up and a ransomware group* attacked us'”
*Ransomware is a malicious software that locks your computer – including all your files – so you can’t access them. The group will usually ask for money for you to get your data back.
Still; maia believes that Switzerland has definitely gotten better at recognising hacking as a useful tool in optimising security and actually avoiding hackers with malicious intentions breaching your systems. As maia also says – hacking has become a serious source for e.g. investigative journalism.
“That was a really big step where we made great progress“
The future does look brighter in regards to the image of hackers – ethical hacking is on the rise, and, as maia said, more and more countries are acknowledging hacking as a valid source of information and research.
Besides that – maia arson crimew also keeps working on new hacks, some big, some small, but all of them published on maia’s blog!
You can listen to this article here (in German)
