This Hacker Took Control of His Professor’s Computer After Missing a Deadline

Robert Graham is widely known in the cybersecurity community for his popular open source tools, such as Masscan, which lets anyone scan the entire internet in just a few minutes, as well as for his sometimes controversial and contrarian hot takes on Twitter.

But just like everyone else, there was a time when Graham was just a youngster learning his hacking chops by reading textfiles or zines, free publications that circulated in the early internet days. At that time, Graham was in college studying computer science, and he had trouble sending in assignments before the deadline.

One time, he said, he turned one in around 4 in the morning—more than four hours after the deadline. It wasn't the first time, so he decided he had to do something about it. 

And that's when he decided to hack his professor's computer.

On this new episode of our podcast series My First Hack, Graham tells us how he broke into his professor's computer, and what he did once he was in.