My First Hack: How Patrick Wardle Hid a Backdoor in His High School Calculator

CYBER

VICE

Tech News, News & Politics, Technology, News

4 • 645 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Years before he became the world’s most well known MacOS hacker, Patrick Wardle was a high school nerd curious about hacking. His first hack was figuring out that he could program his fancy calculator and hide a backdoor in it that could help him with his calculus tests. His teacher never caught him, and he actually learned how to solve calculus equations by programming his calculator. “So I’m sure that in retrospect my calculus teacher would be stoked...or that’s what I tell myself,” Wardle said.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The story starts. I got a Ti-83 for my calculus class in high school.
0:10.0	This was actually my first programmable electronic device that was really my own.
0:20.0	Once I got over the fact that you could, you know, graph equations that look like boobies,
0:26.2	I was really intrigued by programming abilities.
0:32.4	And so in the context of my calculus class, I realized I could write code that implements various algorithms that could then programmatically solve calculus equations.
0:44.3	There's one problem though, and this was that my math teacher would check our calculators during any exam and see what programs were on there.
0:58.8	What I had to do is I basically figure out a way to create a program that would be able
1:03.5	to solve some of these calc equations without getting caught.
1:10.8	Hello, cyber listeners. This is Lorenzo Franceschi B.KRI and without getting caught.
1:12.1	Hello, cyber listeners.
1:14.4	This is Lorenzo Franceschi B. KRI.
1:17.8	And today we have another special episode of My First Hack.
1:21.3	I'm speaking with Patrick Worrell, who worked for the NSA,
1:24.4	but is now well known for finding vulnerabilities and bugs in Apple's operating system, MacOS.
1:27.7	Patrick will tell us about how he hacked into his fancy calculator in high school, and how he
1:33.2	even hid a backdoor in it.
1:41.4	So, hi, Patrick.
1:42.9	Welcome to the show.
2:04.0	How are you doing? I'm great. Thanks for having me on. I'm stoked to talk nerdy with you today. Yeah, you're actually our second guest and both our first two guests are from former spooks. So yeah. Former. We had a, oh yeah, I don't know, I don't want to know about that.
2:05.8	Don't blow your cover here.
2:11.9	But yeah, we had Emily Crows a few weeks ago.
2:14.5	And yeah, I'm excited to have you.
	...

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