Adrian Lamo

Adrián Alfonso Lamo Atwood (February 20, 1981 – March 14, 2018) was an American threat analyst and hacker.

In December 2001, Worldcom praised Lamo for helping to fortify its corporate security.

In February 2002, he broke into the internal computer network of The New York Times, added his name to the internal database of expert sources, and used the paper's LexisNexis account to conduct research on high-profile subjects.

Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest.

The New York Times filed a complaint, and a warrant for Lamo's arrest was issued in August 2003 following a 15-month investigation by federal prosecutors in New York.

At 10:15 a.m. on September 9, after spending a few days in hiding, he surrendered to the US Marshals in Sacramento, California.

He surrendered to the FBI in New York City on September 11, and pleaded guilty to one felony count of computer crimes against Microsoft, LexisNexis, and The New York Times on January 8, 2004.

In July 2004, Lamo was sentenced to two years' probation, with six months to be served in home detention, and ordered to pay $65,000 in restitution.

He was convicted of compromising security at The New York Times, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and WorldCom.

When challenged for a response to allegations that he was glamorizing crime for the sake of publicity, he responded: "Anything I could say about my person or my actions would only cheapen what they have to say for themselves".

When approached for comment during his criminal case, Lamo frustrated reporters with non-sequiturs, such as "Faith manages" and "It's a beautiful day."

At his sentencing, Lamo expressed remorse for harm his intrusions had caused.

The court record quotes him as adding: "I want to answer for what I have done and do better with my life."

He subsequently declared on the question-and-answer site Quora: "We all own our actions in fullness, not just the pleasant aspects of them."

Lamo accepted that he had made mistakes.

On May 9, 2006, while 18 months into a two-year probation sentence, Lamo refused to give the United States government a blood sample it had demanded to record his DNA in its CODIS system.

According to his attorney at the time, Lamo had a religious objection to giving blood but was willing to give his DNA in another form.

On June 15, 2006, Lamo's lawyers filed a motion citing the Book of Genesis as one basis for Lamo's religious opposition to giving blood.

On June 20, 2007, Lamo's legal counsel reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice whereby Lamo would submit a cheek swab instead of a blood sample.

He said that Manning also "took credit for leaking" the video footage of the July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike, which has since come to be known as the "Collateral Murder" video.

Lamo said he would not have turned Manning in "if lives weren't in danger".

He characterized her as "in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as [she] could, and just throwing it up into the air."

WikiLeaks responded by denouncing Lamo and the author of the article as "notorious felons, informers & manipulators", and said: "journalists should take care."

Lamo was a volunteer "adversary characterization" analyst for Project Vigilant, a Florida-based government contractor, which encouraged him to inform the government about the alleged WikiLeaks source.

In February 2009, a partial list of the anonymous donors to the WikiLeaks website was leaked and published on the site.

Some media sources indicated at the time that Lamo was among the donors on the list.

Lamo commented on his Twitter page, "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list... That's dedication."

Lamo was best known for reporting U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to Army criminal investigators in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks.

In May 2010, Lamo informed U.S. Army authorities that Chelsea Manning had claimed to have leaked a large body of classified documents, including 260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables.

Lamo died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 37.

Adrian Lamo was born in Malden, Massachusetts His father, Mario Ricardo Lamo, was Colombian.

Adrian Lamo attended high schools in Bogotá and San Francisco, from which he did not graduate, but received a GED and was court-ordered to take courses at American River College, a community college in Sacramento County, California.

Lamo began his hacking efforts by hacking games on the Commodore 64 and through phone phreaking.

Lamo first became known for operating AOL watchdog site Inside-AOL.com.

Lamo was a grey hat hacker who viewed the rise of the World Wide Web with a mixture of excitement and alarm.

He felt that others failed to see the importance of internet security in the Web's early days.

Lamo broke into corporate computer systems, but never damaged them.

Instead, he would offer to fix the security flaws free of charge, and if the flaw was not fixed, he would alert the media.

Lamo hoped to be hired by a corporation to attempt to break into systems and test their security, a practice that came to be known as red teaming.

But by the time this practice was common, his felony conviction prevented him from being hired.