{"id":9832,"date":"2024-01-16T12:08:44","date_gmt":"2024-01-16T10:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/celestia-co-founder-recalls-hacking-cia-and-baptist-church\/"},"modified":"2024-01-16T12:08:44","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T10:08:44","slug":"celestia-co-founder-recalls-hacking-cia-and-baptist-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/celestia-co-founder-recalls-hacking-cia-and-baptist-church\/","title":{"rendered":"Celestia Co-Founder Recalls Hacking CIA and Baptist Church"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mustafa Al-Bassam, a co-founder of the modular blockchain Celestia, reminisced about his youthful involvement in hacking the <span data-descr=\"Central Intelligence Agency\" class=\"old_tooltip\">CIA<\/span> and a Baptist church.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">my favourite hack was not CIA (which wasn&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/HFEihIVbVX\">https:\/\/t.co\/HFEihIVbVX<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/musalbas\/status\/1746902609116512531?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 15, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>According to the programmer, his favorite episode was the hack of the Westboro Baptist Church, which occurred &#8220;live on a radio show.&#8221; He also clarified that the CIA incident was merely a DDoS attack.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Bassam recommended reading Gabriella Coleman&#8217;s book &#8220;Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous,&#8221; in which he, under the pseudonym tflow, details those days.\u00a0<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p>&#8220;Al-Bassam \u2014 tflow \u2014 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,&#8221; the book states.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In an interview with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thisismoney.co.uk\/money\/meandmymoney\/article-3456015\/Hacker-s-guide-safety-online-inside-view-alarming-truth-surrounding-digital-security-protect-finances.html\">This Is Money<\/a>, the developer shared that his second favorite event during his hacking career was assisting activists in Tunisia in combating government surveillance.<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/uk\/crime\/lulzsec-members-admit-cyber-attacks-on-cia-and-serious-organised-crime-agency-8566037.html\">The Independent<\/a>, 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 <span data-descr=\"Serious Organised Crime Agency of the United Kingdom\" class=\"old_tooltip\">SOCA<\/span>, Sony, News International, and the UK&#8217;s National Health Service.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>He participated in the development of the Chainspace blockchain, which Facebook acquired in 2019. In 2016, the former hacker was included in the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Forbes_30_Under_30\">Forbes &#8220;30 Under 30&#8221;<\/a> list in the &#8220;Technology&#8221; category for his work in exposing government surveillance.<\/p>\n<p>In 2019, he founded the LazyLedger project, which was renamed Celestia two years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In October 2022, Celestia Labs raised $55 million in a round led by Bain Capital Crypto and Polychain Capital.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s native token \u2014 TIA.<\/p>\n<p>In October 2023, the Celestia team completed the deployment of the beta version of the main network called Lemon Mint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9831,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"","news_style_id":"","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1260,44],"class_list":["post-9832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-celestia","tag-cybercrime"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"73","promo_type":"","layout_type":"","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}