Adrian Lamo
American hacker and threat analyst (1981-2018)
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Key Takeaways
- Adrián Alfonso Lamo Atwood (February 20, 1981 – March 14, 2018) was an American threat analyst and hacker.
- , and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest.
- soldier Chelsea Manning to Army criminal investigators in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.
- Lamo died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 37.
- His father, Mario Ricardo Lamo, was Colombian.
Adrián Alfonso Lamo Atwood (February 20, 1981 – March 14, 2018) was an American threat analyst and hacker. Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest.
Lamo was best known for reporting U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to Army criminal investigators in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. Lamo died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 37.
Early life and education
Adrian Lamo was born in Malden, Massachusetts. His father, Mario Ricardo Lamo, was Colombian. Adrian Lamo attended high schools in Bogotá and San Francisco, from which he did not graduate, but received a GED and was court-ordered to take courses at American River College, a community college in Sacramento County, California. Lamo began his hacking efforts by hacking games on the Commodore 64 and through phone phreaking.
Activities and legal issues
Lamo first became known for operating AOL watchdog site Inside-AOL.com.
Security compromise
Lamo was a grey hat hacker who viewed the rise of the World Wide Web with a mixture of excitement and alarm. He felt that others failed to see the importance of internet security in the Web's early days. Lamo broke into corporate computer systems but never damaged them. Instead, he would offer to fix the security flaws free of charge, and if the flaw was not fixed, he would alert the media. Lamo hoped to be hired by a corporation to attempt to break into systems and test their security, a practice that came to be known as red teaming. But by the time this practice was common, his felony conviction prevented him from being hired.
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