An Unexpected Conversation with a Hacker

Before I proceed, I want to state that I don’t know Verite’s gender, I didn’t ask. So my references to “he” and “him” are purely an assumption on my part.  What I do know as facts is that Verite identifies himself as a hacker and reports that he is a teenager.

Yesterday afternoon (Kiwi time), a user with the twitter handle @V3R1T3 sent me a tweet and asked me to pass on a message to the MODX team because they had “blocked” him. Initially, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to engage in conversation with Verite given that he had publicly admitted to defacing the http://modx.com website and had posted a pastebin with some MODX users account information on the web. However, given these facts, the fact that I run MODX on several sites and have an account at modx.com, and my own innate curiosity, I decided to respond, ask a few questions, and see what I could find out. The resulting conversation was quite interesting and I asked Verite if I could post the chat verbatim on this blog for anyone who might be interested. We chatted for a while on twitter and then moved the conversation to Skype.

To give this conversation some context, I will post a bit of background on the events that led up to it. Continue reading “An Unexpected Conversation with a Hacker”