Redazione RHC : 1 July 2025 07:37
He was born on December 12, 1983, in a small village called Pinecrest located in Miami-Dade County, Florida. His father was a computer programmer and his mother was a housewife.
His interest in computers blossomed from the age of 6, where he regularly used his father’s computer to play video games. James’s parents would soon realize that their son was spending too much time in front of the screen and tried to impose restrictions, which James eventually managed to circumvent.
He began programming with the C language. His curiosity for computers came to light as a surprise from his father when he returned home to see his personal computer converted from the Windows operating system to the Linux operating system. James had in fact installed Linux on his father’s computer out of curiosity to test the unknown operating system and understand how it worked.
During his adolescence, he became obsessed with computers and technology as he spent most of his free time, both day and night, on the computer. This led his parents, when he was about 13, to take stronger measures by confiscating his computer, but he ran away from home and refused to return until his parents returned it, reporting that programming and video games were not affecting his school grades.
In fact, his grades were high, although his parents soon discovered that he had hacked the network of educational institutions in Miami-Dade County and corrected his school scores.
During this time, James invented his alias “c0mrade”, while spending most of his time communicating with other hackers online and learning more about computer hacking day by day.
By the age of 15, James had had enough of hacking his educational institutions and set bigger goals. Between June 23, 1999, and October 27, 1999, he committed a series of intrusions into various systems. His first target was AT&T BellSouth, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States at the time.
The details of the hack are not fully known, but C0mrade hacked into the company’s servers without causing any damage. His primary goal was not to profit or steal information, but rather to test his hacking skills on a larger target such as AT&T Bellsouth.
In June 1999, he was looking for vulnerable servers to connect to by bypassing their firewalls. When he found one in Huntsville, Alabama, he went ahead and installed malware on it. He was able to escalate his privileges within the system, extending his access to 13 other computers on the compromised network.
The network belonged to a NASA unit, the Marshall Space Flight Center, located in Huntsville, Alabama. The unit is very important to NASA as it is where they develop and test rocket engines and communications systems for the ISS (International Space Station).
C0mrade gained access to the source code of a program that controlled critical life support elements of the ISS. The system was designed to maintain the physical environment in the living rooms of the ISS and was initially estimated to be worth millions of dollars.
After NASA security experts discovered that their network had been compromised, they took the server, along with the compromised machines, offline for a period of 3 weeks to analyze the intrusion which resulted in $40,000 in direct damages for NASA.
The FBI was working with NASA when they were informed of the intrusion and began their search for the “dangerous” hacker. James was still a schoolboy, attending classes in the morning and hacking for fun in the evenings.
At the end of his hacking journey, in September 1999, C0mrade installed a backdoor on a server in Dulles, Virginia, allowing all Internet users to connect to it. Without thinking twice, he connected to the server and installed a sniffing program to intercept all network traffic passing through the server, including login credentials, etc.
The compromised server belonged to the DTRA (Defense Threat Reduction Agency), a highly significant division of the United States Department of Defense that was analyzing external threats to the country’s national security. James went ahead and intercepted numerous DTRA user credentials, leading him to access dozens of Department of Defense computers. He was able to download thousands of letters from email users who work for the Pentagon.
After the news of his arrest, he became famous at his school and made public comments to the media, accusing the government of not taking security measures on their computer network seriously. He emphasized that he knew the C computer programming language like the back of his hand, studying tirelessly day and night to be able to easily compromise unsecured systems.
During the investigation, it was clarified that James did not run viruses, delete files, or change passwords. He did not cause any damage to any of the compromised systems, and being only 16 years old at the time served him well on the day the verdict was announced. If he had been an adult, he would have faced at least 10 years in prison and a hefty fine.
He pleaded guilty to two felony charges, one for hacking NASA and then the US Department of Defense. In addition, James’s cooperation with government officials in the investigation caused the court to find him guilty of crimes committed by a minor. James received 6 months of house arrest and a ban on using a computer for entertainment purposes, but only for study. The court also required him to apologize in writing to NASA and the US Department of Defense for his actions.
The court judges showed leniency to James by granting him only 6 months of house arrest, but not everything went as planned. He was soon arrested by the police on the street for violating the terms of his house arrest. It was also later discovered from his blood tests that he had been using some sort of drug.
The court went ahead and suspended the old sentence and replaced it with six months in prison, in a juvenile correctional facility in Alabama. This was also the first time in the United States that a teenager went to prison for committing a cyber crime, increasing the attention of the story in all media and press.
He told reporters that he was determined to stop hacking after being caught because it wasn’t worth it and he was just doing it for fun, like playing video games. James served his entire sentence and was released after six months from juvenile detention avoiding the media to live a normal life in his parents’ home in Pinecrest, although the ordinary life James wanted to live didn’t last long.
In January 2007, the Secret Service was on the trail of a huge cyber theft ring led by Albert Gonzalez, another hacker we will meet soon, who was responsible for massive credit card breaches at companies such as TJX, Boston Market, Dave & Buster’s, DSW OfficeMax, etc. The damage was significant for the customers of the companies and also for the companies themselves as the hackers stole the credit card data of millions of users and used it illegally.
Some of James’s colleagues and friends were allegedly members of the ring. Secret Service agents were well on their way to uncovering the ring and contacted Gonzalez’s associates involved in cyber crime. Many of them claimed to know James from hacking forums, which also paid attention to the agents for the case.
What led investigators to suspect James was the fact that an unknown hacker who was collaborating with Gonzales had the alias “JJ”. The alias coincided with James’ initials (Jonathan James), and that was enough for the Secret Service to issue a search warrant for his home.
In January 2007, Secret Service agents raided the homes of James, his brother, and his girlfriend to investigate his potential role in the credit card gang breaches. During the raid on his home, they found a gun and a suicide note from a previous attempt to end his life. James was maintaining his innocence at the time of the ongoing raids.
As it was later discovered, the unknown “JJ” was Steven Watts, who often signed online with the alias “Jim Jones”. Agents were unable to find anything to connect James to the ongoing crimes, resulting in the dismissal of any warrants.
All of these events caused James to be severely depressed. He was often anxious and depressed following the incidents with the Secret Service. On May 18, 2008, James was found dead in the bathroom of his home with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head from the same rifle officers found during the raid.
A suicide note was found near him along with his Paypal passwords and several other accounts. The suicide note, the last one stated:
“I do not believe in our ‘justice’ system – perhaps my actions today and this letter will be a serious signal to the public, but I have lost control of the situation, and this is my only way to fix it. To be honest, I have nothing to do with this whole TJX story. Even though Chris (Scott) and Albert Gonzales are the most dangerous and destructive hackers the feds have ever caught, I am far more seductive [as a victim] to public opinion than these two random idiots. That is life. Remember, it’s not that you win or lose, but that I personally win or lose by being in prison for 20, 10, or even 5 years for a crime that I didn’t commit
Redazione