A hacker who spent a decade in prison after leading one of America’s first cybercriminal groups has spoken out for the first time in a documentary.
Jesse William McGraw, 39, was a contract security officer for United Protection Services when he first appeared on the FBI’s radar in 2009.
Known to authorities by his online alias GhostExodus, he was the founder of the hacker group Electronic Tribulation Army (ETA), an anarchist group that terrorized people and organizations for pleasure rather than financial gain.
“Knowing that you have the power to make someone’s life better or to destroy them is not cliché, but it feels like God,” he said in the CyberNews documentary.
Jesse William McGraw, 39, spent a decade in prison for leading one of America’s first cybercriminal groups
Growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, McGraw had no “emotional connection” with his heroin-addicted father and his mother, who worked as a dancer.
He said he was born to “irresponsible parents” who forced him to educate himself and learn survival skills such as eating, drinking and using the outdoor toilet.
That experience left him ill-equipped to interact with his colleagues, he said, calling them evil “sociopaths” who tried to “find new ways to humiliate you.”
At the time, he was drawn to hacking as an escape route and said it started when he read the Hacker Manifesto, a document considered a cornerstone of hacker culture.
The manifesto promotes the idea that hacking can supposedly adhere to a person’s moral code and there is no need to exploit people or repress selfish desires.
“It perfectly encapsulated the mentality of the hacker spirit,” McGraw said, adding that it is something that still resonates with him and that he still quotes to this day.
“They call us criminals. They build atomic bombs. They wage wars. They murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe it is for our own good, and yet we are the criminals. Yes, I am a criminal.
“My crime is to judge people by what they say and think, and not by how they look.” “My crime is to trick you, something you will never forgive me for,” he quoted.
During his childhood, McGraw moved from house to house and eventually reunited with his mother, who had quit dancing and was an evangelist married to a pastor.
Not a spiritual person, McGraw was involved in church as a youth pastor and music director, but wanted to start his own family.
He sought some semblance of control, which led him to form ETA, which initially had good intentions but ultimately became what it sought to destroy.
“ETA combated cyberbullying, pedo hunting, and dismantled problematic hacker groups,” but as ETA grew, it became less about the victim and more about our shame,” he said in the documentary.
McGraw was sentenced in 2011 to nine years and two months in prison, ordered to pay $31,881 in restitution fees and be placed on three years of supervised release after completing his sentence.
On February 12, 2009, he was found guilty of installing malware on more than 14 computers at North Central Medical Plaza in Dallas.
He was already working as a security guard at the hospital when he decided to use his physical access to internal systems to weaponize them and attack hostile hacker groups such as Anonymous.
The decision was due to a suspected cyberattack by Anonymous on one of the ETA members.
McGraw claimed the hacking group accessed the member’s court records, including his Social Security number and other personal information, as well as inappropriately photoshopped images of his child.
He said he concluded that the only way to combat the problem was to use the systems he already had access to “to weaponize them and attack these actors.”
McGraw installed malicious code or bots that allowed him or anyone with his account name and password to access the computer’s data from a remote location.
The FBI raided the homes of three ETA members in July 2010 who were accused of intimidating a witness following McGraw’s arrest. R. Wesley McGrew of McGrew Security reported McGraw’s video to the FBI after discovering screenshots of GhostExodus accessing the HVAC computer.
The ETA members, known only by their ETA names “Fixer,” “dev//null,” and “Xon,” reportedly harassed McGrew, who claimed he received threatening emails and phone calls and his The website was the target of DDoS attacks.
“They set up a website in my name where they pretended to be me and posted embarrassing content or things that they thought would embarrass me, including an appeal for the purchase of sex toys and fake pornographic images,” said McGrew told Wired at the time.
“They collected email addresses from the university I work at and emailed them to them.”
Jesse William McGraw was surrounded by the FBI at the Carrell Clinic Center in Texas after an investigation revealed he had downloaded malware onto the hospital’s computers.
In the documentary, McGraw recalled arriving outside the hospital around midnight on June 26, 2009, believing that a dark van parked in the parking lot belonged to the cleaning crew.
But as he exited his vehicle in front of the glass doors, three FBI agents and two high-ranking police officers surrounded him, brandishing weapons and shouting at him to stop.
“My first thought is that this is a prank… I’m getting punked by Ashton Kutcher,” McGraw said, referring to the popular MTV reality show “Punk’d.”
McGraw was arrested at the scene and charged in July 2009 with two counts of transmitting malicious code. Nearly a year later, he pleaded guilty to both charges.
U.S. District Judge Jane J. Boyle sentenced McGraw to 110 months in prison on each count, to be served concurrently.
While reflecting on his time infiltrating the hospital’s computer systems, the former ETA hacker compared the experience to something akin to acting as a higher power.
“Knowing that you have the power to make someone’s life better or to destroy it – it’s not cliché, but it feels like God.”
But looking back, McGraw said if he could give his younger self any advice: “…It would literally be these words: ‘Give up chopping.’
In the documentary, McGraw described himself as “the first person in modern U.S. history ever to be convicted of corrupting industrial control systems,” adding that his sentence “set a precedent for what would happen next to who did something like that.”