The rise of a hacktivist: an exclusive interview with Dexer

In Los Angeles, California, in 2006, a 13-year-old high school boy’s eyes were opened as he curiously watched another student phishing MySpace accounts. This seemingly insignificant event would become the catalyst of a life journey. A door to another world appeared, and he found himself tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Computers have always been the life force that gives existence to the children of the machine generation, serving as that innate first cause, like the Big Bang in the cosmos. Hackers exist as a consequence of modern innovation, but hackers have never come to fruition more fully than with the advent of the computer and the realization that rules were meant to be broken.

This is the story of Dexer, a hacktivist shaped by the school of hard knocks, where computers became his salvation. In turn, he would come to rise and stand firm for the salvation of the innocent in the global fight to protect kids from online predators.

The blackhat story begins

Traveling back to the 90s, Dexer was a first-generation Hispanic living in Los Angeles, a bustling, fast-paced city with a population of around 3,485,567 people, who always had technology at his fingertips. He remarked he couldn’t recall a day when he didn’t use computers, and Windows 98 was the operating system on the scene at the time.

“At 6 years old, there was no thought other than that it was just another thing school was making me use. I was curious about it, but Nintendo 64 dominated my brain then.”

I spent a good part of my teenage years in the 90s growing up in Los Angeles myself. I can attest to how rough schools are. “I was bullied and harassed for most of my childhood and teenage years, so computers became a kind of refuge,” he recalled.

“My mum couldn't understand it, but according to her, it kept me from the street life.” His father had left when he was only 9 years old, leaving them to fend for themselves.

And then something happened. He was now 13, and as though peering through a veil into another world, he witnessed a classmate phishing MySpaces profiles and stealing credentials. And thus, his hacking story began.

“I learned the ropes that way,” Dexer said.

He helped his classmate build the phishing pages by designing templates. The hacker, in turn, took him under their wing and showed Dexer the basics of HTML coding. Everything else he had to discover on his own.

After that fated encounter with a hacker, the gears in his brain started to turn. He knew he had to learn everything he could about hacking, and so he set off on a journey for information. Dexer then began launching his own phishing campaigns for the lulz, driven by kicks and thrills.

“I would feel like having some sense of power. I also started to learn how that classmate got around the school firewalls which was getting a sh** load of proxies. I was undetected for many years in school by doing that.

Back then, hackers didn’t have convenient scripts to automate the framework needed for attacks. They had to build their phishing kits from scratch by downloading login pages from popular websites and altering the form submission POST request.

They would redirect the POST to an off-site man-in-the-middle server designed to capture the credentials entered by unsuspecting victims. Once the form was modified, hackers would host the fake login page on a server they controlled, then lure victims to the site using deceptive emails, messages, or links, often disguised as legitimate communications from trusted websites.

Dexer took a deviation and began digging through the past, wanting to learn about the previous hacker generation, those who grew up using Telnet to dial into BBS systems to appreciate the sub-culture that brought us here.

“When I discovered bbs in 2008, I was obsessed with it. I wanted to learn everything about it.”

Transitioning from blackhat to hacktivist

Dexer reminisced, recalling a time when he lacked a moral compass in his earlier days as a hacker. “My blackhat phase … was the most selfish era of my life I will say. I did things because I could.”

It never crossed his mind about the possibility of getting arrested. Despite that, he took his OPSEC very seriously.

By 2011, the Occupy Movement was spreading like a California wildfire, and Dexter got his first taste of the hacktivist group Anonymous. This period of activism was a golden era in modern American history, marking a new phase of massive global movements.

“Hacking and other things I was doing then were my priority. By 2010, I knew of Anonymous through Operation Payback,” he said.

The experience was surreal, especially since he asserts the belief that many of the new generations of Anonymous members don’t fully understand how Anonymous impacted and influenced the mainstream media propagandists in those days.

“I’ve seen things that made my soul feel way older than what my appearance is.”

Dexer.

“I remember walking to one of the members and started talking. There was much noise as there was the trial going on of Michael Jackson's doctor, Conrad Murray. Celebrity and the gritty hacker culture are at one intersection of the street. But I had agreed to come back and put on the mask since why not?”

“Little did I know that later on, the police department would break up the Occupy camp, so I never got the chance. My reaction is I just shrugged and said, ‘Oh well, not today.’ And that was it. Just did my thing afterwards. The trial ended up going until it was over. Since then I met one or two members of the Jackson family and went on to become a juror in a trial as I was in the middle of my own hacking journey. Funny how that works.”

Regretfully, he explained that in the end, he was too focused on himself and didn’t care enough to join the movement then, even though he had the opportunity to be a part of the Occupy Movement.

"But again, I was selfish, so I didn't care enough to join the movement. And I had the opportunity around the occupy movement when I saw Anons in a city building across the street, and then it was the Conrad Murray trial.”

He recounts, saying that as life is, a phase usually has an end. He decided that his blackhat days would end when he graduated high school. That would be the first day of the rest of his life, to prepare himself for the world of adulthood.

The plan seemed to work. He left the hacking scene for four years. Life happened, and he was free from its beck and call. The influence waned and dissolved into memories. It became a thing of the past.

Until one day, something happened that transformed his life forever.

Online child safety and mental health impact

It was the tragic suicide case of Amanda Todd on October 10th, 2012, that had the power to drive him back into hacking. Only this time, with a complete change of perspective.

The untimely death of the 15-year-old Canadian student had been a victim of sextortion, in what he describes as “the first of its kind, especially because it involved a minor.”

He realized something he hadn’t seen before – a need to take up the online fight to protect kids. In this, he found purpose. However, as anyone who has taken up this fight can attest, the journey is dark.

“I’ve seen things that made my soul feel way older than what my appearance is.”

“I formed my own group then and did our own thing for years. From what Anons would know as #OpChildSafety, we had our own version of it, “ he said.

It’s curious to note that hunting online sexual threats against children shouldn’t even be a thing – that’s law enforcement’s job.

Conversely, civilians like ourselves shouldn’t have to investigate these matters. But that’s just it. Civilians have to because the inadequacies of law enforcement and self-policing by the big tech industry have created a vacuum that is seemingly too vast to get under control, which is where hacktivists come in.

“I dunno what was it about Amanda specifically that drove me to want to help on that magnitude,” he recalls.

“But that girl was the reason I did a complete 180 on my journey as a hacker where it wasn't just about my selfish ego. It was about finding out who was responsible for her death. Helping any other kids who might've been going through the same in being extorted by pedos or just victims, in general, was done too. If we didn't do it, who would've?”

He banded with likeminded hacktivists and began to work exclusively on unraveling the truth of what happened to Amanda Todd, which branched out in an attempt to uncover the identity of the man responsible for sextorting her. This evolved into a campaign to help others who had become victims of sextortion.

“Amanda's death changed the internet. Her death saved many lives. But it also changed mine. She gave me a purpose,” said Dexer.

His group managed to take down some low-level sites, but the more they took down, the more would pop up. They sent their reports to law enforcement, but he explained that you never know if they even read the reports, let alone act on them.

“But we still continued to do what we had to.”

He continued, expounding on his OpChildSafety work, “I don't want to talk about what I saw. Even if you weren't a victim of sexual abuse. But you feel like you are with each victim you find being exploited. The f****** terrible nightmares I would get. I was afraid of falling asleep at times. I was in my early 20s mind you, and going to college during the day and doing this sh** at night or at times when you didn't have a class.”

“I probably used the free mental health counseling way too much to keep me sane. However, when I went to appointments, I never talked about what I was doing then. I talked about everything else. Minus what I was doing. How could you? This is the other side of pedo hunting nobody talks about. The mental health component and how much it can drain you.”

As the hunt for the truth and justice for the Amanda Todd case, everything was coming full circle and falling apart. The members of his group were struggling, relationships were falling apart, and they felt like they were nowhere closer to uncovering the person who had targeted Amanda.

Dexter quit and tried to live a normal life. But when you're an OpChildSafety hunter, you never really stop hunting. It stands to reason that if you're not there to investigate these matters, no one will.

His group reformed under the name ‘The Federation’ around 2020. The rest is history.

Nowadays, Dexer asserts that he’s taking a break from things. But if the past can teach us anything about the future, it’s not out of the question to believe that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Dexer, the hacktivist and champion of OpChildSafety.

A hacktivists advice

As with most interviews that I have with hacktivists, I like to end on a note of advice. Dexer emphasized going the legal route if you’re interested in learning how to hack, such as CTF sites like Hack The Box, which he wishes was on the scene when he started at 13.

“Always keep learning. Study for a degree if you feel inclined to, which is something I personally regret not doing. But if you do go into hacking, keep in mind that you know what you are getting into.”

“If you go to the dark places of the web because you think it's badass, I'm here to tell you to be aware of the aftermath. I lost relationships, friendships, and legit opportunities because of what I did out of my own doing. Some get arrested for pushing too far. Be smart with your sh**.”