Brett Johnson has seen cybercrime from both sides. Once dubbed the "original Internet Godfather" by the US Secret Service, Johnson built and ran Shadow Crew, an early organized cybercrime community, before eventually leaving that life behind. Now, he works with law enforcement and businesses to help defend against the kinds of threats he once deployed.
In this conversation with Dark Reading's Kristina Beek, Johnson shares what he spoke about at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas alongside Illumio, demonstrating how artificial intelligence (AI) can compress the time it takes to carry out an attack. Johnson also shares his insights on how AI may be playing both sides for now, but the attackers are getting the better end of the deal. The technology helps threat actors research targets, identify valuable data, and find exploitable weaknesses faster, giving them an advantage over defenders who may still be reacting to threats.
AI is also lowering the barrier to entry for would-be cybercriminals. As technical skills become less necessary and criminal communities continue to share information and tutorials, more people can learn how to carry out cyber fraud and other attacks. That shift, Johnson warns, could put hospitals, schools, and other critical organizations at greater risk — and make it even more difficult to trust what people see and hear online.
Listen and read along for the full conversation, and take a look at Dark Reading's other video content here.
Kristina Beek and Brett Johnson: Full Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length by Informa TechTarget's internal AI assistant. For the full experience, please watch the video.
Dark Reading's Kristina Beek: Thanks so much for joining us today, Brett. I'm so excited to talk to you. My understanding is that you are giving a demo at Black Hat USA this year in Las Vegas, and I would love if you could just tell me about your background and what it is that you plan on sharing at Black Hat.
Brett Johnson: I'm the guy that's responsible for a lot of modern cybercrime. The United States Secret Service dubbed me the original Internet Godfather.
And the way I got that title was I pled guilty to 39 felonies. I was placed on the United States Most Wanted list. I had an escape from prison. Yeah, I did. And I built and ran the first organized cybercrime community. It's called Shadow Crew. It's a precursor of today's darknet, darknet markets, lays the foundation for the way modern financial cybercrime channels still operate today. Shadow Crew is interesting because it's not only the first Dark Web marketplace of its type, but it also established that trust mechanism that these channels and platforms would continue to use, actually through today, unless you're talking about Telegram. But that's what I did. Nothing to be proud of, but it made the front cover of Forbes, August of 2004.
October 26, 2004, United States Secret Service, they arrested 33 people, six countries, six hours.
I was the only guy publicly mentioned as getting away. They picked me up about four months later. They gave me a job. And I continued to break the law from inside Secret Service offices for the next 10 months until they found out about it. Then I took off on a cross-country crime spree, stole $600,000 in four months, wake up one morning in Las Vegas. US Most Wanted. What does idiot here do? Well, I sat there and looked at the screen and I said it out loud. Well, Brett, you've made the US Most Wanted list.
What are you gonna do now? And I said, I'm going to Disney World. And I did.
DR's Kristina Beek: Yeah.
Brett Johnson: Lasted about six weeks. Got arrested, sent to prison, escaped from prison, arrested again, served up my time. And the interesting thing is I always had people that looked out for me when I was on the bad side, today on the good side. And a lot of people really wanted to see me turn my life around. I kept being given the opportunity.