Redazione RHC : 1 July 2025 07:36
A few months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a strange message appeared on a U.S. Army computer:
“Your security system is shit”
it read.
“I am Alone. But I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”
In fact, Gary McKinnon, single-handedly scanned thousands of U.S. government machines and discovered obvious security flaws in many of them.
Solo broke into nearly a hundred PCs within the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the Department of Defense between February 2001 and March 2002.
Solo navigated through them for months, copying files and passwords.
Solo took down the entire US Army network in Washington, DC, knocking out about 2,000 computers for three days.
American lawyer Paul McNulty called his activity:
“the largest military cyber attack of all time.”
But despite his expertise, “solo” could not cover his tracks and was soon tracked down to a small apartment in London.
In March 2002, the UK’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit arrested him, a quiet 36-year-old Scotsman with elfin features and arched Spock-like eyebrows. He had been a systems administrator, but was unemployed at the time of his arrest; he spent his days indulging in his obsession with UFOs.
In fact, McKinnon claimed that UFOs were the motivation for his violations and that he was convinced that the US government was hiding alien anti-gravity devices and advanced energy technology and planned to find and release the information for the benefit of humanity. He said his intrusion was detected just as he was downloading a photo from NASA’s Johnson Space Center of what he believed to be a UFO.
He was captured in the UK following an extradition request from the United States in what some see as a scapegoat prosecution. In 2012, he was denied by the UK to US justice, also because Gary McKinnon has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism that certainly contributed to these violations. In fact, he is considered one of the greatest computer minds of all time and many supporters gathered outside Parliament with picket signs. “Free Gary” websites, T-shirts, posters were created.
In fact, rock star David Gilmour, the former guitarist of Pink Floyd, even recorded a charity song in his honor.
The range of conditions known as autism spectrum disorders (such as Asperger’s syndrome) currently affects 1 in 110 American children, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers say diagnoses of these problems are increasing faster than those of any other developmental disorder. Medical researchers still don’t understand the cause and are nowhere near a cure.
People with Asperger’s are often highly intelligent, and many have a deep understanding of complex systems, leading researchers to investigate a possible link between autism and engineering, and the syndrome is closely linked to hacking and the world of hackers.
But people with Asperger’s have serious difficulty reading social cues and understanding the impact of their often obsessive behavior.
“There have been an inordinate number of young people with Asperger’s who have had problems with the law,”
said autism expert Rhea Paul of the Child Study Center at the Yale School of Medicine.
“It’s hard for them to make moral decisions online that may come easier to others,”
He added. McKinnon’s lawyers argued that his criminal behavior was the result of his disorder and, as a result, have asked the courts to judge him leniently.
McKinnon had always been fascinated by space. A mischievous, bright boy from Glasgow, he would ask his parents technical questions about the distances between planets and the scientific names of stars. “It was the kind of thing a child wouldn’t normally talk about,”McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, told IEEE Spectrum . “It was very unusual.”
But McKinnon’s obsessions went far beyond astronomy.
Whenever Sharp took him on a bus, the boy would scream uncontrollably. By age 10, he had become fearful of the outdoors and would spend hours in his room devouring books about space or listening to music.
The boy was troubled, but his obsessions seemed to give him a sense of control and peace. Although he was not a musician, he spent hours at the piano learning to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and complicated Beatles songs. Sharp couldn’t believe his ears. “We were knocked out,” he says.
By age 14, he taught himself to program video games—set in space, of course—on his Atari computer. McKinnon joined the British UFO Research Association and found a community of like-minded space enthusiasts. When he learned that his stepfather had grown up in Bonnybridge, an English town famous for UFO sightings, he questioned him for information, his mother recalls.
But while McKinnon dreamed of flying saucers, he struggled with everyday life on Earth. After dropping out of secondary school, he fluctuated between jobs in computer support. His childhood fear of public transport worsened further, and McKinnon suffered blackouts when he had to take the London Underground. Although he lived with his childhood sweetheart, a bright and lovely girl, he couldn’t bear the thought of starting a family.
“How can I be responsible for a child?”
he asked his mother. As his relationship with his girlfriend fizzled out, McKinnon became increasingly despondent, losing his job and refusing help.
His mother feared his depression would lead to suicide. But McKinnon made a key discovery: the new world created on the nascent Internet of the mid-1990s. “That’s when he started looking online for information about aliens,” Sharp recalls. “It was his escape.”
After reading The Hacker’s Handbook, the classic 1980s hacker manual, McKinnon decided to do some investigating himself. Late at night, in his darkened bedroom, he began trying the book’s techniques, and in 2000 he decided to search for UFO evidence on U.S. government computer systems.
McKinnon put his powers of concentration to good use, obsessively searching for ways to break into the machines.
Using the Perl programming language, he wrote a small script that allowed him to scan up to 65,000 machines for passwords in less than 8 minutes. After calling the government systems, he ran the code and made a startling discovery: many federal employees failed to change the default passwords on their computers.
“I was astonished by the lack of security,”
He later told the Daily Mail .
On these unsecured machines, McKinnon installed a software program called RemotelyAnywhere , which allows remote access and control of computers from the Internet. McKinnon could then navigate the machines at will and transfer or delete files. Because he could monitor all activity on the computers, he could log off the moment he saw anyone else logging in.
With his deep fixation, McKinnon navigated government computers from Fort Meade to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in his search for ET. He claimed to have found a list of “non-terrestrial officers” in the U.S. Navy, as well as a photo of a cigar-shaped UFO studded with geodesic domes (a photo he couldn’t save, he said, because it was in Java script). After a lifetime of obsession with UFOs, he was now feeding his habit like never before. He was also relishing the thrill of hacking. “You end up wanting more and more complex security measures,” he told the Guardian in 2005. “It was like a game. I loved computer games. This was like a real game. It was incredibly addictive.”
But eventually the game was over. The US Department of Justice has not publicly discussed how it learned about McKinnon, but believes his intrusion was detected when he logged on to a computer at the Johnson Space Center at the wrong time. He said his access to that computer was immediately cut off; he believes the government then discovered the RemotelyAnywhere software on the machine and traced his purchase back to his email address.
In March 2002, his mother’s phone rang. “I was arrested,’’ McKinnon said.
Sharp’s throat tightened: What trouble had her son gotten himself into? But McKinnon told her not to worry. The U.K.’s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit had arrested him under the Computer Misuse Act, McKinnon said, which carried a relatively benign sentence of six months’ community service. “I don’t need a lawyer,” McKinnon assured his mother. But that would prove incredibly naive.
In 2005, the United States moved to extradite McKinnon under an extradition treaty created after the September 11 attacks to help prosecute terror suspects.
The U.S. Justice Department isn’t interested in his bizarre motivations for the hack and says the damage he caused has been serious. He is accused of causing more than $700,000 in damage ($5,000 per machine) and deleting at least 1,300 user accounts and operating system files. It was his deletion of critical files that reportedly brought down the U.S. military’s network in Washington, D.C., for three days (McKinnon claimed he did it by accident).
The Justice Department argued that McKinnon’s conduct significantly disrupted government functions and jeopardized national defense and security.
McKinnon faced a potential sentence of up to 70 years behind bars in a U.S. prison. When his family heard the news, they were “stunned and scared,” Sharp recalls. As word spread online and in the British media, people began to protest the excessive punishment. Sharp organized a campaign to get help for his son, and got it in a surprising way. A woman who had seen McKinnon on TV thought he was showing signs of Asperger’s syndrome and suggested he see a psychiatrist.
Like many people, Sharp was unfamiliar with the condition. “I thought it had something to do with being retarded,” she says. But when she thought about her son’s unusual behavior over the years – his fear of traveling, his obsessive behavior, his lack of social skills – she began to realize something was unusual. McKinnon agreed to be assessed by one of the world’s leading experts, Simon Baron-Cohen , director of the University of Cambridge’s Autism Research Center.
In the course of his research into autism, Baron-Cohen has become an authority on the emerging connection between Asperger’s and engineering. “It makes sense that someone with Asperger’s would become skilled at hacking,” he tells Spectrum , “simply because one of the things they share is an understanding of systems, including computer systems.”
Baron-Cohen has found that more than 50 percent of people with Asperger’s have an obsessive interest in technology, physics, and space. He has also found that autistic children are more likely to have fathers and grandfathers who are engineers than typical children. He has also speculated that the rising incidence of autism spectrum disorders may be the result of a modern trend for engineers to marry other engineers or like-minded people.
On October 16, 2012, Theresa May, the UK’s Home Secretary, rejected a request for her extradition from the United States. The decision was based on the precarious physical conditions of the fifty-four-year-old Scot.
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