I’m a hacker who was jailed for a decade for heading up a cybercriminal organization – I was so powerful I felt like God

A hacker has spent a decade in prison after heading up one of America’s first cybercrime groups He first spoke in A documentary.

Jesse William McGraw, 39, was a contract security guard with United Protective Services when he first appeared on the FBI’s radar in 2009.

He was known to authorities by his online alias GhostExodus and the founder of the hacker group Electronik Tribulation Army (ETA), an anarchist group that terrorizes people and organizations for fun rather than financial gain.

“Knowing that you have the power to make someone’s life better or ruin someone’s life, not to be a cliché, but it’s like being a god,” he said in the CyberNews documentary.

Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, McGraw had “no emotional connection” to his heroin-addicted father and his mother, a dancer.

He said he was born to “irresponsible” parents, which forced him to raise himself and embrace survival skills like eating, drinking and using the bathroom outside.

He said that this experience made him incompetent to communicate with his peers, describing them as bad “sociopaths” who tried to “find new ways to humiliate you.”

That’s when he was drawn to hacking as an escape, saying it started when he read the Hacker’s Manifesto, a document considered a cornerstone of hacker culture.

The statement promotes the idea that hacking can adhere to a person’s moral code and does not need to exploit people or substitute selfish desires.

“That perfectly summed up the mentality of the hacker spirit,” McGraw said, adding that it’s something that still resonates with him and that he still quotes to this day.

“You call us criminals.” You make atomic bombs. You wage wars. You kill, cheat, lie to us and try to make us believe it is for our own good, and yet we are the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal.

“My crime is that I judge people by what they say and think, not by their appearance.” My crime is that I beat you, which you will never forgive.”

During his childhood, McGraw was moved from home to home and was eventually reunited with his mother, who had transitioned from dancing and was a missionary married to a pastor.

McGraw was not spiritual but immersed himself in the church as a youth pastor and music director but wanted to start his own family.

He searched for some semblance of control, leading him to create the organization ETA which initially had good intentions, but eventually became what they sought to destroy.

“ETA was combatting cyberbullying, poaching, and dismantling problematic hacking groups,” he said in the documentary, but as ETA grew, it became less concerned with the victim and more concerned with our notoriety.

McGraw was sentenced to nine years and two months in prison in 2011, must pay $31,881 in restitution fees, and serve three years of supervised release after completing his prison term.

He was convicted of installing malware on more than 14 computers in North Central Medical Plaza in Dallas on February 12, 2009.

He was already working as a security guard at the hospital when he decided to use his physical access to the internal systems to weaponize and attack hostile hacking groups such as Anonymous.

The decision arose due to an alleged cyberattack by the Anonymous group on an ETA member.

McGraw claimed that the hacking group accessed the member’s court records, including his Social Security number, other personal information, and inappropriately edited photos of his child.

He said he came to the conclusion that the only way to combat the problem was to use systems he already had access to “in order to weaponize and attack these actors.”

McGraw installed malicious code or bots that allowed him or someone with his account name and password to access computer data from a remote location.

The FBI raided the homes of three ETA members in July 2010 who were accused of intimidating a witness following McGraw’s arrest. R. Wesley McGrew, of McGrew Security, flagged McGraw’s video to the FBI after he discovered screenshots of GhostExodus accessing an HVAC computer.

ETA members, known only by their ETA names “Fixer,” “dev//null,” and “Xon,” are said to have harassed McGrew, who claimed to have received threatening emails and phone calls and had his website targeted by DDoS attacks.

“They created a website in my name to pretend to be me, and put up embarrassing content or things they thought would embarrass me, including a call to action to buy sex toys, and fake porn pictures,” McGraw said. Wired on time.

“They got the email addresses from my university and emailed them to them.”

In the documentary, McGraw recalls arriving at the hospital around midnight on June 26, 2009, and thinking a dark truck parked in the parking lot belonged to a cleanup crew.

But when he got out of his car in front of the glass doors, three FBI agents and two senior police officers surrounded him, brandished rifles and shouted at him to freeze.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘This is a joke… I’ve been fooled by Ashton Kutcher,'” McGraw said, referring to MTV’s popular reality show Punk’d.

McGraw was arrested at the scene and charged with two counts of transmitting malicious code in July 2009 and pleaded guilty to both charges nearly a year later.

U.S. District Judge Jane J. Boyle sentenced McGraw to 110 months in prison on each count, to be served concurrently.

While reflecting on his time hacking into hospital computer systems, the former ETA hacker compared the experience to something akin to acting like a higher power.

“Knowing that you have the power to make or break someone’s life, it’s not cliché, but it feels like a god.”

But looking back, McGraw said that if he could give himself any advice when he was younger, “…literally these words would be: ‘Stop pirating.’

In the documentary, McGraw described himself as “the first person in modern US history ever to be convicted of corrupting industrial control systems,” adding that his sentence “sets a precedent for what would happen next for someone who did something like this.”