Hello and welcome to The Upgrade, a podcast from the team at Lifehacker.com, where we help you improve your life one week at a time.

I'm Melissa Kirsch, editor-in-chief of Lifehacker.

I'm Alice Bradley, Deputy Editor of Lifehacker.

And I'm Andy Oren, staff editor at the site.

And today we're talking cybersecurity, privacy, and hacktivism with security researcher

and former Black Hat hacker Hector Monsiger.

You may know Hector by his hacker

alias Sabao, which he employed in the 2010s when he was a hacking mastermind, breaching targets

daily, everyone from Nintendo to News Corp to Middle Eastern governments. When Hector's identity was

discovered by the government, he became an informant for the FBI. Hector is now Director of Assessment Services at Rhino Labs, as well as an expert on the new Science Channel series Outlaw Tech, which explores the complex security systems designed to stop hackers and the high-tech arsenal being employed on both sides of the law.

Welcome, Hector.

Hi, Hector. Hey.

Let's talk a little bit about you and, you know, for our audience who might not know all of the

details of how you came to be a security expert.

So you were affiliated with Anonymous and Lulsec.

For anyone who doesn't follow hacktivism super closely, can you just explain to us what

those networks are?

Well, Anonymous was not an organization.

It was more like a movement. It was a concept. It was an idea. And, you know, these guys got it from

like V for V for Vendetta. You know, it's, it's nothing that was really well thought out.

Because when you have a decentralized organization, you have chaos. And eventually it all collapses.

So it was part of Anonymous.

...