Featured Image Credit: LADbiblestories / YouTube
Up there with the Pentagon, Fort Knox, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, you might imagine that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is pretty damn secure.
After all, the FBI is known for tackling everything from terrorism to organized crime, public corruption, and cybercrime. Apparently, its supposedly secure network wasn't enough to stop a 10-year-old girl from hacking into it years ago.
It shouldn't be child's play to get inside the FBI, but for Chris Kubecka, that's exactly what happened.
Instead of seeing it as an innocent mistake and writing things off as 'kids will be kids', Kubecka faced harsh punishment.
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Speaking to LADbible Stories, Kubecka explained how a 10-year-old girl can even get into the FBI, as well as the ramifications she soon felt.
Kubecka had a love of space from a young age, thanks to several members of her family working for NASA. However, her dreams of becoming an astronaut soon shifted to computing, thanks to her mother being a programmer for the agency.
Saying that she started creating little horror games with Easter eggs from a young age, Kubecka then dabbled in the world of 'ethical hacking'. We've seen these kinds of people explore the Dark Web, so we don't have to, also warning against the likes of hackers.
At the age of just 10, Kubecka's school had just gotten a grant and installed some brand-new computers that fed her curiosity. In her own words, Kubecka explained: "I explored so much, I found my way into the Department of Justice and the FBI, and I thought, this can't really be real.
"It must be a game, because their passcode was only zero, zero, zero, zero. So I didn't think it was real, because it was too easy."
Unfortunately for the young hacker, she really had found her way into the DoJ and the FBI, accidentally stumbling across files on undercover FBI agents.
Explaining a little more about how she hacked the FBI, Kubecka said she used a dial-up modem and simply saw whether the computer on the other end was connected. If it were, she could communicate with it, possible to even play games on someone else's computer back in the day.
Even though many would argue the fault should lie with lax security rather than the curious mind of a young girl, Kubecka's actions must've triggered the FBI, which tracked her down two-and-a-half weeks later: "I was caught red-handed. in the library wearing pigtails. They did not expect that."
While the FBI probably expected someone a little more experienced, that didn't mean the agency took it easy on Kubecka.
As for what it was like being apprehended, Kubecka said: "When you're a kid and you see two grown adults who want to take you to a police station, you're like, 'Oh no...' You have no idea what's going to go on.
"You've been taken from your safe place, which is in front of a computer in the library to someplace that's very cold."
Due to several members of Kubecka's family having high security clearance at NASA, she was slapped with an administrative order that banned her from most types of computers until she was 18.
There was also the idea that she could've cost her relatives their jobs, with the ethical hacker concluding: "Their careers were kind of put at risk, because when you have a very high security clearance, the threat was that they could have been basically suspended with their security clearance being re-reviewed for being associated with me, the child hacker criminal.”
Nowadays, Kubecka is an ethical hacker and cyberwarfare expert who's faced some of the world's most dangerous hackers but has put her talents from her formative years to good use.
