Welcome to malicious life in collaboration with Cyberism. I'm Ran Levy.

How does somebody end up becoming a hacker? Nikita Kuzmin certainly didn't have to become one.

He was a good-looking young guy.

Short blonde hair, bright blue eyes,

his skin was pale, a little pimply, sharp features with stubble growing

along his sideburns.

For someone his age, he was quite enterprising. He drove around on an old banged-up motorized bike he originally

found one day lying on the edge of a road after it's been crashed and ditched by its owner.

He often thought of replacing that dinky bike with a fancy car,

but it got him around for most of his teen years.

In another life, Nikita could have been any number of things. With his skill set, he could

have been a highly sought after a cybersecurity expert, a whiz programmer, or maybe even the

CEO of a tech company.

Because he was brilliant.

Early on, as a young teenager, Nikita's coding skills were admired by older peers.

That, perhaps, was not a good thing.

Without the role models in his life that could have guided him in honing those skills towards building things or getting a job maybe he instead became an active

member of Shadow crew a web form for cyber criminal activity during the early 2000s, Shadow Crew.com was the center of the hacking universe.

The stories and the people that were born out of that form, Brett Shannon Johnson, Albert

Gonzalez, Alexei Corralove, and others will be subjects of and malicious life episodes to come.

Nikita worked alongside many of the most famous and respected cyber criminals of his time

has he honed his skills coding spyware and remote access trojans.

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