Signals

Hacker stories, security long-form, breach narratives, and exploit post-mortems. The history and present of the people who bend signals.

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SIG

In June 2010, a small Belarusian antivirus firm received a malware sample they could not immediately classify. Six months of analysis later, the security industry understood that it had found the first piece of malware specifically built to cause physical destruction in the real world. The target was a nuclear enrichment facility. The operators were two of the most capable intelligence services on the planet. The era of cyber-physical warfare started here.

nullbyte :: April 18, 2026 :: 10 min read

SIG

Jude Milhon was at the Selma march in 1965, was one of the few professional women programmers of the 1960s mainframe era, coined the word cypherpunk in the early 1990s as a wordplay on cyberpunk and cipher, and spent her last decades as the most beloved counterweight to the libertarian male orthodoxy that had grown up around the Cypherpunks list. The cypherpunk movement has the name she gave it. It has remembered her unevenly.

Ripper :: April 17, 2026 :: 10 min read

SIG

On May 12, 2017, a 23-year-old security researcher in Devon registered an obscure domain he had found inside a piece of ransomware spreading globally. The registration acted as a kill switch and ended the WannaCry outbreak before it took down the National Health Service entirely. Three months later, FBI agents arrested him in a Las Vegas hotel room. The story of what happened in between is the story of how strange the modern security industry actually is.

nullbyte :: April 17, 2026 :: 10 min read

SIG

Peiter Mudge Zatko sat at the L0pht Heavy Industries table when seven hackers told the US Senate in 1998 that they could take down the internet in thirty minutes. Twenty-four years later he sat in front of Congress again, this time as the Twitter whistleblower describing security failures that helped reshape the largest social platform's legal exposure. The arc between those two appearances is one of the most useful careers to study in modern security.

Ripper :: April 17, 2026 :: 9 min read

SIG

In the summer of 1988, a former Intel physicist handed out a one-page essay at the Crypto '88 conference. The essay argued that strong cryptography would, by purely technological means, render most state regulation of online activity unenforceable, and that this was a positive outcome. Most of the document's specific predictions came true. Some came true in ways the author would not have endorsed.

keysmith :: April 16, 2026 :: 10 min read

SIG

Eric Corley took a pen name from Orwell, founded a quarterly magazine in 1984 dedicated to a subculture that the rest of the world was already moving to criminalize, and spent the next four decades operating a radio show, a quarterly print publication, a biennial international conference, and a constant defense of the proposition that hackers are not the same as criminals. The hacker community has had institutional anchors come and go. Goldstein has been the steadiest of them.

Ripper :: April 14, 2026 :: 9 min read

SIG

Cybersecurity reporting in 2010 was a niche beat with a small audience. By the time Kim Zetter finished publishing Countdown to Zero Day in 2014, she had done something that most security writers had never managed: she had told the story of a complex nation-state malware operation in a way that ordinary readers could follow without losing the technical truth. The shape of long-form security journalism since then is largely her shape.

Ripper :: April 13, 2026 :: 7 min read

SIG

On November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a self-replicating program that brought a meaningful fraction of the early internet to a halt within hours. He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He also became, eventually, an MIT professor, a Y Combinator cofounder, and the rare cautionary-tale figure whose second act overshadowed the cautionary tale.

nullbyte :: April 12, 2026 :: 10 min read