More HACKING with AKMA

I open the season with someone I’ve already thanked across half the internet and wanted to thank in my own house. He goes by AKMA, he’s twenty-six (he confesses it here for the first time) and he does cybersecurity outreach aimed at the everyday user, that entry-level step almost nobody covers in Spanish.

He started out as a kid, ten or eleven years old, cracking his own wifi with Wifislax before moving on to nmap, Metasploit and the rest. Today he works at a bank on afternoon and night shifts, posts on Twitter and Instagram as akma_999, and runs personal audits on influential people who have no idea how exposed they are with just an email address. We go over the scams he sees most (CEO fraud, bank impersonation with spoofing, SIM swapping) and why SMS as a second factor is a sieve. He also tells how, using social engineering, he tracked down the person who had been taking down his friend Chocas with denial of service attacks.

He gets thirty or forty messages a day asking him to hack their current partner’s WhatsApp, and he tells them all the same thing: not a chance. His advice for getting started is simple: English, a bit of Python and a lot of patience.