Hello and welcome to Real Crime Profile. I'm Kathy Canning Mello, retired FBI agent and profiler.

And here with me today is my dear colleague and co-host.

It's Jim Clementi, retired FBI profiler, former New York City prosecutor, right producer of criminal minds, and Bluebeard on Audible.

And also, Kathy and I did, on Audible, FBI Profilers, criminal archives, talking about 15 of our most notorious cases.

But today we're going to talk about a new thing, something that we haven't spoken much about,

but it's cyber hacking. And there's a great article in ABC News about a teen, a young hacker, and his name is Matthew Lane.

He's 20 years old now. He was 15 when he started hacking. And he was able to hack a massive corporation

that literally affected millions and millions of people around the world.

So let's get into this guy.

Great, yeah.

You know, I found this article fascinating and I learned a ton not only about cyber hacking as it relates to gaming,

but also about neurodivergent people and how equipped they are for hacking and gaming.

Right. Well, and I think, you know, it comes from gaming. Some, I don't know what

percentage of neurodivergent people are attracted to gaming, but some are very attracted to it.

And they live in their own world sometimes, and gaming is their only real interaction with other humans or

non-humans. And in this case, this guy, Matthew Lane, when he was 15, he was playing a game

and on these games, what I didn't know, this is my biggest learning point from this entire

event, is that kids are encouraged as gamers to sort of hack the game, to be able to manipulate

the game and go further in the game and win the game and beat other people who are

also hacking the game. And then when other players who are there for nefarious purposes, when

they recognize in a young guy that he has, or she, for that matter, has attained a certain level of competence in hacking a game.

They start giving them other challenges.

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