by preventing her teenage granddaughter from bathing in front of hundreds of thousands of strangers. “We had an extra security system put in [the house].”
This wasn’t the first time a Stickam entertainer had been hacked. While Stickam was successfully monitoring content the previous fall, it began hearing about a rash of hacker attacks perpetrated by a notorious gang called Team n0d, started by a 16-year-old computer whiz who went by the name Too Live. Too Live, who prefers to remain anonymous, says he considers himself a “gray hat” hacker—one who makes Internet start-ups aware of security flaws by gleefully taking advantage of them. “It’s fun, but I help them out by reporting exploits,” he tells me over IM.
Stickam didn’t mind—at first, anyway—and sent Too Live a free webcam out of gratitude.
But when Team n0d hacked into the site to show how easy it was to redirect friend-request links to steal—or phish for—personal information, the hackers were banned. So Team n0d decided to strike back against the lifeblood of the site, the entertainers. “We started attacking the website by hacking users’ profiles and hijacking administrator accounts,” Too Live reveals. “Stickam didn’t think we would react in such a destructive manner, so they didn’t do anything but let us be.”
It was the Net equivalent of the geeks affectionately punking the popular girls. Team n0d would steal passwords, and then vandalize homepages with their gang name. Hilton figured they were the ones behind her harassing calls, and contacted Too Live, who knew right away who VIP was: Jeffrey Robert Weinberg, a 22-year-old hacker who was part of a group indicted for breaching a database at LexisNexis and stealing the private records of more than 310,000 people, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Demi Moore. In January 2007, Weinberg began serving a ten-month prison term for aggravated identity theft. When he got out, he
56 APRIL 2009 / SPIN.COM IS IN LUV WIT’ A STRIPPER
faced three years’ probation, during which his computer was subject to random searches and he was prohibited from going online.
But he couldn’t resist temptation for long, and began stalking Cam Girls, including Hilton’s friend Chelsea, an 18-year-old from Florida who blogs under the name Audiowhoregasm. With her blonde hair with black ends, Chelsea was another familiar face on the Stickam scene and was also being harassed for nude photos. “I was really scared,” she says. “If he can get my home phone number, he can get anything.”
Too Live was no fan of Weinberg’s work and wanted to help bring him down. For Stickam, the story had come full circle: The company needed its biggest star and most notorious hacker to capture its most dangerous enemy.
wasn’t enough—Hilton needed proof to have him arrested, so she went to the police and filed a report. And on January 1, 2008, 45-year- old Detective Eric Jones responded. A 19-year veteran of the LAPD, Jones was an old-school gumshoe with a thick mustache. The two became an unlikely dynamic duo—the self-described “analog detective” and the Internet girl. To get up to speed, he stayed up late on the phone with Hilton, as she told him how to log on to MySpace and surf Stickam chat rooms.
When Weinberg called Hilton back angrily the next day, Jones was listening in and had given Hilton specific instructions not to reveal that he was on the line. But seconds into the call, Hilton blurted, “You better watch what you say, Jeffrey, because my detective is right here on the line.” Jones slapped his forehead as Weinberg cackled defiantly. “Hey, detective,” he taunted, “catch me if you can. I’m a ghost.”
After getting Stickam to reactivate her accounts, Hilton scoured Weinberg’s trail for clues until she found five numbers buried in her hacked user info—92629—a zip code, she knew, in Orange County. She also found a site urging visitors to prank the reviled hacker, including the message “VIP’s hungry, order him pizza,” followed by a phone number and address in Dana Point, California, a coastal town near Laguna Beach.
Hilton dialed the number, and a woman answered—Weinberg’s mom. When she was told what her son was doing, she started crying. She told them that she was fighting cancer and that her son wasn’t home. At 4 A.M. on January 11, Jones and a group of undercover cops approached Weinberg at an LA Fitness club in Orange County, where he worked the front desk. “You know who I am?” Jones asked him.
“No,” said Weinberg.
“I’m the ghostbuster,” Jones replied with a smile. Weinberg was charged with six counts: attempted extortion, fraudulent computer
access, unauthorized computer access, disruption or denial of computer services, annoying phone calls, and identity theft. They had him. In May 2008, Weinberg pled no contest and was sentenced to two years in California state prison.
The prison declined an interview with Weinberg for this story, but his father, Rodrick, thinks the problem lies in technology as opposed to, say, common sense. (Prohibited from computer use as part of his release, Jeffrey Weinberg used his father’s laptop to stalk Hilton. Who knew a convicted hacker could get past Daddy’s password?) “When you’re dealing with a computer, if you’re extremely talented, you can do a lot of things that most people couldn’t or shouldn’t do,” Rodrick says. “And that’s the danger of being online.”
Stickam now knows that securing a live video community is not just a matter of keeping tabs on the content, but also a watchful eye on the vulnerable young celebrities it might spawn. “The larger one of our shows is now, the more we pay attention,” says Jake Gold. “A program like Amor’s will have more people targeting it.”
Hilton’s grandmother says the experience was a wake-up call about her granddaughter’s life online. “There is a concern there,” Cotton says, “and I think [the kids] should not reveal too much of themselves. But I think a lot of the online celebrities, what they reveal is not necessarily themselves. I think what they’re revealing are fantasies.” She can’t speak to Amor’s show, though, because she’s never seen it. As Cotton puts it, “I’m respecting her privacy.”
Hilton claims the encounter with VIP hasn’t deterred her. “I’m more cautious now,” she says. “I’m a lot smarter than I used to be.”
But she’s as exposed as ever, if not more so. She appeared with her mother on the MTV show Sex…With Mom and Dad and claims to have a pilot deal at MTVu. (MTV was not able to confirm this.) But she’s sacrificing real-life stability for success, couch surfing at friends’; looking for a day job doesn’t appear to be an option. “Amor is a motivated young lady and, in some ways, very adult,” says Detective Jones. “And in other ways, she’s still just a kid.”
Though Hilton thinks notice has been served to other would-be attackers that she’s not to be taken lightly—“They don’t have the balls to mess with me; they know I sent someone to jail,” she says brashly—she’s still surprisingly naive about the one thing she has achieved after all: online stardom. “I didn’t think I was anything special,” she says. She tells me how she recently had to ask her younger brother for a reality check. “Do you really think I’m what everyone claims me to be?” she asked him. “Famous? Are they for real?”
“Are you stupid?” he replied. “Of course you’re famous!”
“I was like, ‘Wow. That’s really weird,’” she says, as if waking from a dream. “That’s cool, and it can help my business out a lot.”
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