Celestia Co-Founder Recalls Hacking CIA and Baptist Church

Mustafa Al-Bassam, a co-founder of the modular blockchain Celestia, reminisced about his youthful involvement in hacking the CIA and a Baptist church.

my favourite hack was not CIA (which wasn’t even a hack but a ddos), but the Westboro Baptist Church, which was a 0day in a shitty PHP CMS, which we hacked on a live radio show https://t.co/HFEihIVbVX

— Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) January 15, 2024

According to the programmer, his favorite episode was the hack of the Westboro Baptist Church, which occurred “live on a radio show.” He also clarified that the CIA incident was merely a DDoS attack.

Al-Bassam recommended reading Gabriella Coleman’s book “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous,” in which he, under the pseudonym tflow, details those days. 

“Al-Bassam — tflow — experienced firsthand the power of the law knocking at his door, and he did so after several months of targeted actions in which he believed,” the book states.

In an interview with This Is Money, the developer shared that his second favorite event during his hacking career was assisting activists in Tunisia in combating government surveillance.

According to The Independent, in 2013, the 18-year-old Al-Bassam and three other members of the Lulzsec group pleaded guilty to numerous cyberattacks. The court charged them with involvement in hacks of the CIA, the SOCA, Sony, News International, and the UK’s National Health Service. 

The Celestia founder was sentenced to 20 months of probation and 320 hours of community service. Following this, Al-Bassam turned to research in distributed ledgers.

He participated in the development of the Chainspace blockchain, which Facebook acquired in 2019. In 2016, the former hacker was included in the Forbes “30 Under 30” list in the “Technology” category for his work in exposing government surveillance.

In 2019, he founded the LazyLedger project, which was renamed Celestia two years later. 

In October 2022, Celestia Labs raised $55 million in a round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.

In March, the company spun off the developed modular Rollkit structure to support rollups on the Bitcoin blockchain into a separate business line. Several exchanges, including Binance, listed the platform’s native token — TIA.

In October 2023, the Celestia team completed the deployment of the beta version of the main network called Lemon Mint.