Ricky Handschumacher’s first step on a path that would get him millions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency and a run-in with the law happened during a game of Halo 3. His Xbox screen went black while he was playing the futuristic first-person shooter game that pits humans against aliens. When it returned to normal, he had been killed. He was the victim of videogame cheating called “standbying.” A gamer friend on his high-school baseball team in Florida told Handschumacher about an online forum where he could learn how to use this technique, which he began doing. Just 16, he had stumbled into a chaotic community, eventually known as the Com, that was pushing the limits of online behavior. Over the next 15 years this group of gamers and hackers would grow up with Handschumacher, emerging as a major cybersecurity threat. They developed techniques that would wreak havoc on technology and telecommunications companies, while earning some members millions of dollars in theft and extortion payments, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“We’ve seen an uptick in the severity of and the sheer number of folks who are at a very young age committing serious cybercrimes,” said FBI agent Will McKeen. Learning about gaming cheats is often the first step. “It starts you down that pathway toward a comfortability with doing things that are kind of against the rules, and no one’s checking you and saying, ‘Hey, you know if you do that that actually crosses a line.’”
Today, more seasoned hackers are recruiting kids from the gaming world. To “standby” a fellow gamer, Handschumacher launched a cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS), against his gaming rival. He could go to websites that would charge him about $10 a month to launch the attacks—crushing his opponents with unwanted internet traffic. In the gaming world, the DDoS attacks would paralyze his rivals as he moved about the Halo world, killing them one-by-one. “It was like getting free wins,” Handschumacher said. “You felt like you were in control and there was nothing they could do to stop you.” The son of a nurse at the county’s sheriff department, Handschumacher was a popular student who liked to Rollerblade and batted nearly .400 on his high school baseball team. Online, his social skills made him very good at talking technology companies into giving him access to accounts. He was convicted in 2021 at age 28 for stealing cryptocurrency.