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Shownotes
In Episode 20 of Darknet Diaries, we heard from Greg aka “mobman” who said he created the sub7 malware. Something didn’t sit right with a lot of people about that episode. It’s time to revisit that episode and get to the bottom of things.
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Sources
youtube.com/watch?v=GDMc2PZM4V4
illmob.org/notmymobman
darknetdiaries.com/episode/20
Transkriptvom Podcast bereitgestellt · Zeitmarken springen hin
JACK I remember the first time I posted something online. It was a video game guide in the nineties,
and there’s an internet adage that I think is true. It goes like this; the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer. I posted a guide on how to beat a video game, and it immediately got downvoted, mocked, ridiculed, and I was told to get good. At first I thought they were joking. Like, I had beaten this game a hundred times with this strategy. What are you talking about, ‘get gud’? But then after some pushback, they started cluing me in, telling me exactly where my advice was wrong and giving me tips on how to properly do those parts of the game. I was blown away. What I thought was impossible to do in the game people were actually doing.
Now, dear listener, this experience shaped me for who I am today. If you post something genuinely helpful online and people mock you, that could be the end of you ever posting anything online again. It’s enough to ruin your self-confidence and hate everyone online. But I had the opposite reaction. I loved this game and played it thousands of times, and they were giving me tips and strategies on how to be way better than my best strategy that I had, and I genuinely wanted to be way better. Not only that, I got to make friends with other people who were really passionate about this game. It was an amazing experience. Fast forward to today. We’re 150 episodes into this podcast. That’s 134 hours of me yapping. I’ve got a lot of feedback over the years. Most of
it is positive, but today, today I’ve got to correct something I got wrong, really wrong. (Intro): [Intro music] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] JACK: Over the years, one episode I’ve published has haunted me, Episode 20, called Mobman. Yeah, take a listen to this short clip of it.
GREG [MUSIC] I made the Sub7. It’s a remote access tool, and it was aTrojan horse virus.
JACK He built a program that would allow him to take control of another computer.
GREG You could open and close a CD-ROM. You could flip the screen. You could hide
the Start button. You could move the mouse on their screen and click around, you could open up their C drive, change their wallpaper.
JACK This is an episode where I interviewed a guy named Greg who went by the name Mobman,
who claimed to have made the Sub7 malware back in the nineties. [MUSIC] The episode haunts me because I have received numerous comments that listeners don’t believe he’s the guy who created Sub7. For instance, there’s a Reddit post where someone said, I just started listening to Mobman this afternoon and couldn’t finish it. I just don’t believe this guy made Sub7 or could have created a rat at all. It’s not just his attitude or personality; it just seems as if he only has a cursory knowledge of any of the technology used.
Multiple times throughout the interview, something he said just didn’t quite make sense or didn’t match up with what I remember from that time period. Then some other commenter said, I had the same impression, too, and someone else said, he’s fakey-wakey. Then someone else said, I remember the creator was Romanian, and that guy’s not Romanian. I fact-check my guests as best I can, but I do most of the research and writing for this show, and I can only check so much. Before publishing that episode, I spoke to some people who knew Greg personally from Tampa, where he’s from, and they told me he’s legit. On top of that, he was featured in a Rolling Stone magazine article saying he’s the one who created Sub7.
I figured Rolling Stone would do some fact-checking themselves, right? Also, Greg offered to show me the source code for Sub7, and he demonstrated how he has control over the Sub7 domain name. So, I just show this to people who didn’t buy the story. But as I listened to people and read more theories about this, it started to make me think. [MUSIC] Maybe they’re right. Maybe I interviewed the wrong person. See, I interviewed a guy named Greg who goes by Mobman, and on every version of Sub7, it was created by someone calling themselves Mobman. So, I was starting to think, wait, if Greg didn’t make Sub7, then are there two Mobmen out there? If so, where is the second one? Somewhere around 2004, the Sub7 creator, Mobman,
disappeared, and Greg just so happened to get arrested at the same time, too. So, he says that’s why he disappeared. So, did two Mobmen disappear at the same time? If there are two, then Greg is the only one who came back as Mobman. The other Mobman is still out there somewhere. Well, a guy named Ill Will took it upon himself to find the real Mobman, and he spent years hunting through the internet looking for him, and eventually found a clue which led him to a potential e-mail address used by the real Mobman. He e-mailed him and sure enough, he said, yeah, I’m the one who created Sub7. You found me. I got connected with this Mobman to hear the story. Hello, hello.
MOBMAN Hi. You’re very punctual, right at 12:00 on the dot.
JACK Yeah. Why not? Now, you call — you have the tag here, Mobman, here on our call.
MOBMAN I do.
JACK Is that your nickname?
MOBMAN Yes.
JACK When did you start using that?
MOBMAN Oh, 1999, I want to say.
JACK What is the meaning of it?
MOBMAN It comes from a rap band, a Romanian rap band, called B.U.G. Mafia. So,
Bucharest Underground Mafia; that’s their name. I’m a big fan of them, and when I was thinking — coming up with a new nickname, it just had a nice ring to it. Mobman, you know?
JACK Yeah, yeah. I like it.
MOBMAN Yeah.
JACK This is — it’s a trip, you know, to get here because…
MOBMAN Yeah.
JACK …for the last six years I’ve known Mobman to be a different guy.
MOBMAN I’m aware.
JACK Now I feel like I’ve met a new Mobman. So,
let’s go back to the nineties. What was your early experience with cyber security?
MOBMAN It wasn’t really a hacking thing. It was more of a programming thing. I taught myself to
program when I was very little. I did a whole bunch of little games. This was back when I was still in Romania. So, in ‘97, I moved to Canada with the whole family, and then I found out about Delphi. I wanted to start learning Delphi, so I just happened to pick rap to work on, basically.
JACK [Laughing]
MOBMAN That was it.
JACK That’s…
MOBMAN That’s how everything started.
JACK So, the story goes, Sub7 was born.
MOBMAN Yeah. Well, it all stemmed from NetBus, right? That was — it preceded
Sub7. It was one of the original remote — or one of the originalTrojans. It was called NetBus. So, I played around with that a little bit, and that’s kind of what inspired me to create something similar. So, I was…
JACK What did NetBus do?
MOBMAN It was the same thing, a remote-access Trojan rat. It had
a little UI and a server you would send somebody and then connect to them. So, that’s kinda what I was trying to emulate when I started. Then after I got a couple of features going, I packaged it up and uploaded it to a hacking site. That started picking up steam. I had my contact details on there and people started sending me e-mails, contacting me; oh, can you add this? Can you add this? Can you add this? So, that’s kinda how it grew from there. I was like, hm, I wonder if I can do this in Delphi. So, I would look into it, do some research, see if I can find it out, and if it was possible, I would just do it.
JACK If you created this as a coding challege,
did you ever feel bad when people used it for malicious purposes?
MOBMAN It was all fun. At the beginning and for the first many versions, it was all just fun,
having fun with people, playing tricks on them; pranks and things like that. That was the whole motivation behind it and everything else. But then I started hearing all these stories about people using it for malicious purposes. Always in the back of my mind was sort of like, well, there’s many of these tools available. They just happened to pick the one I made. They would have just picked a different one if it wasn’t for Sub7. So, it’s part of why I left, I guess, in the end. I wanted to get into something else, some sort of different — throughout the whole thing I always tagged as a hacker, as — but it was just — I was just a programmer, just trying to learn to program.
JACK The thing is, as this tool began getting popular, it started to be used
more and more in criminal activity, using it to take over someone’s computer. You can see exactly what they’re doing on it, or you could steal their files or session cookies or wipe their computer and delete everything. The problem is, creators of malware have sometimes been arrested just for creating it, not even doing anything bad with it, because those creators were knowingly creating tools or weapons for criminals to do crimes with. Sub7’s official reason for existence was to prank people? It was for jokes and stuff?
MOBMAN Some of the most popular features in it were the ones just for fun,
like the Matrix one. It just turned your whole screen black and you would type letters one by one. It was basically a chat, but you couldn’t get out of it. You couldn’t do anything. You would just chat back and forth with whoever was on the other end.
JACK But as it started being used for more malicious reasons,
that’s when Mobman decided to leave the scene and basically not look back. He went on to programming and leaving the name Mobman in the past, too.
MOBMAN The very first time I heard about somebody impersonating my name and taking credit for all
this stuff was — stemmed from your podcast. I had a local friend, Sebastian — we call him Septa — that is a big fan of your podcast and heard that you had an interview with Mobman. Obviously he knew who that was and was looking forward to listening to it, and listened to it. He’s like, what is this? Who is this guy? He sent me a message; he’s like, yo, I listened to the podcast expecting you, and it was this other guy talking about some random stuff. I don’t know what’s going on. That’s how I found out first. Then a couple of months later, Ill Will contacted me.
He’s the one that started the whole process. He sent me a little zip file with a couple of details about me. He had a picture of my car. He was like, the password for the zip file is your full name. So, if it’s really you, then you should be able to open it. He’s like, I’m 99% sure that it’s you, that I’ve traced you down. I replied; I said, well, you’re right. You can be 100% sure now. He was the one that kinda not convinced me, but — ‘cause I was a little bit indifferent, right? This was a long time ago. I don’t know if I really want to get back into any of that. But he made a good point; a lot of people have made their start with this, and it’s not right to have somebody else take the credit. History should be set straight.
JACK So, let’s set the record straight. This is the real Mobman, the actual creator of Sub7,
but even though this real Mobman heard my interview with another Mobman, he still didn’t want to contact me to fix it.
MOBMAN ‘Cause the whole thing was I didn’t want to publicly
say who I was. I didn’t want to publicly admit all this stuff.
JACK Why was that?
MOBMAN I don’t know, I don’t know. After a really, really long time,
it didn’t really make any sense to still stay hidden.
JACK Yeah, I mean, it makes sense what you were saying a minute ago, which was like,
I was young when I did that. I’m done with that. I don’t want to be part of that. I don’t want to revisit that. I can see there’s a lot of reasons. What I was worried — was like, oh yeah, some people did some awful things with that and the FBI’s looking for me.
MOBMAN I think people started getting in trouble for making tools like that at that
point. Like you said, just for making them, not for actually using them. So, that contributed to like, I need to get outta here.
JACK Yeah. Did you get any heat from law enforcement?
MOBMAN No, no, I did not.
JACK ‘Cause you had your e-mail there, and I could see somebody being like,
alright, we gotta put an end to this guy.
MOBMAN Yeah, no, no. I never got into any actual trouble or heard of anything,
but I kept everything private, like every — nobody knew my name, even the people that were closest to me, closest to me in the scene, like part of the crew and things like that. Nobody actually knew me. They knew the city I was in. The very first version said the city I was in. It said, ‘From Windsor, Ontario’.
JACK Okay, this makes sense. This is a tool that while, yeah,
has started a lot of cyber-security careers, has also caused a lot of damage. With people like Marcus Hutchins being arrested three years after creating some malware, it’d make sense for the real Mobman to let someone else take credit since it’ll allow him to stay hidden in real life. He has a bunch of family and stuff and just wants it all behind him. But after looking through Ill Will’s research and speaking with this Mobman for an hour, I’m convinced this is him. Wow, six years after posting the episode we finally discover the truth, and now we can lay it all to rest. But there’s still something that’s bugging me. Why would Greg pose as Mobman all these years? We’re gonna take a quick break, but stay with us because when
we come back, I’m calling Greg. Okay, time to call Greg, aka, Mobman. Hey, you there?
GREG Yeah, I’m here.
JACK Oh, hey, man. How have you been?
GREG Pretty good, just busy working and sleeping and doing kid stuff.
JACK The story of Sub7 has been researched more thoroughly since
you’ve appeared on my podcast, and it just wasn’t adding up for some people. I was put in contact with the original author of Sub7, a Romanian fella named Mobman.
GREG Okay.
JACK So, I mean, clearly — at this point I’m believing that he’s the one who created it,
right, and so now I’m wondering, well, hold on, you’re the one who said you created Sub7. What’s going on here?
GREG Right. So, you were introduced to him through — I’m assuming — Will, and…
JACK Yep, Ill Will.
GREG So, they all like, made a person? Did you check his ID or anything?
JACK [Laughs] But yeah, he seemed to be able to produce some evidence, right?
GREG So, I mean, I have a lot of that stuff, too. You just never
asked. I showed it to a couple other people that I know in my inner circles.
JACK So, are you — are we talking about the same Sub7, though? Because there’s — this
conflicting story is just not gonna work for me. I’ve gotta have a source of truth here.
GREG Ill Will’s claims on his website — we could go to. You put in ‘Mobman’,
it comes up in the Google searches, and there’s all kinds of claims on that web — it’s like it’s reaching for straws, every little thing, and then after ten years, he finally gets enough straws to put together a whole, big persona or whatever he’s doing for this other Mobman person.
JACK My god, Greg is doubling down. He’s saying he’s the real
Mobman and this other guy is a made-up persona. Ah!
GREG Alright, and then what about the Gmail account and the domain name?
JACK Okay, go ahead, tell me.
GREG Well, does this other person have access to it or run it?
JACK To the Gmail account and domain name? [Crosstalk]
GREG [Inaudible] for everything? Yeah, yeah, that’s hardcoded into the source code.
JACK And you’re saying you do?
GREG I do.
JACK Okay.
GREG Then you could see the registration dates on
them and stuff. It outlines — all the times have never been kinda changed.
JACK Yeah.
GREG So, maybe we get this other dude and me together?
JACK Alright, I’ll see if I can. You’d be wanting
to talk with him? We’ll get Ill Will on the call, too?
GREG I’d rather not talk with Ill Will. I think — and quite honestly,
I try not to even talk about the Sub — or even anything that I’ve done in the past, but they got all these laws and computer laws and shit nowadays. It’s like, I don’t want them to go retroactively and find some crap to get me in more trouble. I’d like to meet the guy, or whatever, and then we could see. We could get to the bottom of it.
JACK Alright. Alright, I’ll see what I could do. Thanks for this call. I’ll keep in touch.
GREG Alright. Bye.
JACK Bye. [Laughs] We got two Mobmen here now? This is crazy. I need some answers,
though. I went back to the other Mobman and I was like, hey, could we do a call with both of you? He’s like, yeah, let’s do it. So, we did the call, and I’ll just play for you the conversation mostly unedited. Hello.
GREG Hey, what’s up?
MOBMAN Hello.
JACK So, I hit Record already because this is such an epic call. I’ve never
had two people of the same name on my podcast at the same time.
GREG There was nobody else named Jack?
JACK Honestly, as I was chatting with both of you, I was getting confused on who’s who.
GREG When? Oh.
JACK Just because you’re both named Mobman.
GREG Oh. I know. It sucks, ‘cause I’ll be trying to play video games and I’ll sign up and
I’ll put my name in there, and then I’ll see it’s taken. I’ll be like, who the hell made that? So…
JACK Well, today you get to meet the person who made it.
GREG Yeah, well, I don’t know if he plays games.
MOBMAN The one with the Romanian accent is the real one, just to set that up.
GREG So, do you play video games? Call of Duty or something?
MOBMAN Who are you asking? I’m not here to socialize, dude.
JACK Okay, so, yeah…
MOBMAN Let’s get into it.
JACK What are we here for? We are here to discover — it’s not so much the name, right?
People reuse names. There’s a lot of Jacks in the world. I’m not worried about my name being reused. Or, probably ‘Mobman’ has been reused before. But the question at hand here is the creation of Sub7 is being claimed by both of you, and the tricky part here is neither of you really want to claim it because it’s like, hey, man, that’s kind of a sensitive subject. I don’t really want to put my face on front of that thing, ‘cause it has been used for purposes that maybe you don’t want to claim or whatever. So, it is a tricky subject to try to navigate, but here is the situation where I’m trying to explain what this tool is, and I’m getting confused on who actually made it.
GREG Well, a few people made different versions of it.
MOBMAN No, they did not. Only one person made all the versions, dude.
GREG Oh, yeah?
MOBMAN Go into every single version that was released, into the credits screen, and under
Programmer, there’s only one name ever. There’s also multiple Romanian quotes from B.U.G. Mafia. It’s quite obvious that the author is fucking Romanian, not some Greg guy from Florida. Really?
JACK Why is it — why was there only one programmer of this app?
MOBMAN ‘Cause it was just me doing everything. The whole source, I was in
possession of it the whole time. [Crosstalk] It was released a couple of months ago.
JACK Why is — today you have GitHub and it wasn’t the same back in the nineties,
but with GitHub, people can contribute and help out. You didn’t want other people to help out. You didn’t want to share the source code. Why was that?
MOBMAN It’s ‘cause it was a mess. I learned Delphi by working on Sub7. It was my very first
project. It was spaghetti code. That was the main reason it wasn’t shared, and every single version was dedicated to B.U.G. Mafia. How do you explain that, Greg?
GREG So, I found these YouTube videos, and people made something called Sub7 SAT. Then I know…
MOBMAN How is this related to Sub7?
GREG Reid 101 made some — and then John — he made some, too, for SS.
MOBMAN This was at the very end after I left the scene. There was one version released by Reid 101.
GREG Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MOBMAN That’s what you’re bringing up?
GREG [Crosstalk] I don’t know if you could see the screen or not…
MOBMAN How do you explain B.U.G. Mafia in the credits? Can you answer the question?
GREG The band…? The — ‘cause they’re…
MOBMAN Yeah, the band, the Romanian hip-hop band that was mentioned in every single
release. It’s the band where the nickname Mobman comes from. How do you explain that?
GREG Let me pull up the videos of — well, we used to listen to them.
MOBMAN Videos of what? In 1999, the first version that does mention it, B.U.G. Mafia didn’t even
have any songs online, man. I brought tapes with me from Romania. They were only on tape. You could not have heard of them on the internet in 1999 when this was put in the About credits.
GREG Yeah, they were.
MOBMAN It just doesn’t makes sense, man, like, everything. You mentioned that you
made it for some Ultima Online things, like to steal credits or something? What was the story, Jack? ‘Cause he mentioned it on your podcast.
JACK Yeah, yeah, just to mess with his friends, it sounds like, to me.
MOBMAN It was all an Ultima Online thing? Like, you would find traces of
looking up UltimaOnline.exe or .ini or something. You could open it up, ‘cause the server opens up files and you can find those file names if you open the .exe in a text editor. So, you’d find — it had a method where it would modify win.ini to start up, so you could find that reference in the .exe there. None of the versions have any sort of reference to any Ultima Online things, files or .exes or program names. The stuff that you came up with doesn’t make any goddamn sense, man. I’m surprised that it lasted this long, honestly.
GREG And…
MOBMAN I’m surprised you’re able to bullshit for this long.
GREG And the master passcode?
MOBMAN The master passcode has my birthday in it. That’s another one.
It has my birthday in it. [Crosstalk] Are you born in October 15, 1980?
GREG How do you know — how do we know that that’s your birthday?
MOBMAN I’ll send you a picture of my driving license.
GREG [Laughing] I want to hold up my driver’s license, too, ‘cause it says the same thing.
MOBMAN I highly doubt that it says that. I doubt that you’re born on October 15, 1980.
You show me a picture.
GREG You could just Google it. It’s in my arrest record and everything,
too. But I could put the ID up on the…
MOBMAN Oh, is that what started the whole thing,
the whole stealing the identity ‘cause the birthdays matched?
GREG Well, then how would I know that that’s your birthday?
MOBMAN ‘Cause it was mentioned. It’s under Sub7 Wiki, man. It was a known fact.
GREG Right. The Wikipedia gets changed like, every other month…
MOBMAN Okay.
GREG …and I’m mostly the one correcting it.
MOBMAN So, on the official Sub7 website…
GREG Uh-huh. Go ahead.
MOBMAN …there were multiple references to Romania and Craiova, the city where I’m from.
GREG For October…? For…?
MOBMAN How do you explain those? No, no…
GREG I was still on the birthday.
MOBMAN This isn’t related to the birthday. I’m just going back to the Romanian thing.
There’s multiple verses in Romanian in the About screens in a couple of the different versions.
GREG Yeah, when you hit the About and the Help, yeah.
MOBMAN Yeah. So, how — what? It’s obviously a Romanian that made it,
not some Greg guy from Florida.
GREG Greg from the Canada?
MOBMAN And also, yeah, speaking of which, the first five or six versions, the first thing
that the About credits said was ‘From Windsor, Ontario’. Were you ever in Windsor, Ontario?
GREG Do you see these credits on the software?
MOBMAN Yeah. You can get any of the versions,
download any of the old versions. There’s multiple. There’s twelve, fifteen.
GREG Do you have them all?
MOBMAN Every single one, you can go to the About screen…
GREG Yep.
MOBMAN …and the first five or six say ‘From Windsor, Ontario,
dedicated to B.U.G. Mafia’, and some of them have quotes in Romanian.
GREG Yeah, they all say that, yes, for the Bug…B.U.G.
MOBMAN Have you ever been to Windsor, Ontario?
GREG No. I haven’t been to Canada. They don’t…
MOBMAN Then how do you explain that?
GREG They don’t want me to go to Canada.
MOBMAN I know they don’t, ‘cause you have a record. How do you explain that,
then, in the credits? You can’t do…
GREG Let’s see…
MOBMAN …you can’t come up with bullshit fast enough. I’m missing the Euros for this, you know?
GREG You’re what? You’re wasting euros for this?
MOBMAN I’m missing the Euro 2024, the soccer game.
GREG Oh.
JACK It’s a long game. You’ll be alright.
MOBMAN I’m just kidding. Romania played yesterday.
GREG [Laughing] I didn’t even know there was a soccer game going on.
JACK Greg, how did you get into Delphi?
GREG Just learning and programming, right? It’s one of the languages that were just hanging
out — it had the [inaudible] instead of just — that you could make menus and stuff like that, so…
MOBMAN What does — all the Delphi programs, what do they start with? What does a function start
and end with? What does a Delphi function start and end with if you’re such a good programmer?
GREG The functions? Or like, the top where the little — the…?
MOBMAN Yeah, the function. What’s the first thing you do after the function? What is the
beginning and the end of the block of code? How is that denoted in Delphi?
GREG Program?
MOBMAN No. How do you define the beginning and the end of a
function? You know in C you have the curly brackets? What do you have in Delphi? Like, Jack, this is ridiculous, man. I doubt this guy even touched Delphi.
GREG Sorry, are you talking about the semi-colon…? [Crosstalk]
MOBMAN It’s just, there’s nothing that makes sense.
GREG …all the functions at the end or…
MOBMAN I’m talking about the words, man.
GREG …or like the question mark or whatever for PHP or when you start — the — call it?
MOBMAN So, let’s say you define a function, right? [Crosstalk]
GREG Right, you type the word ‘function’…
MOBMAN You say, function test…
GREG …and then you put the function name, yeah. You declare it.
MOBMAN Yeah, and then what’s on the next line?
GREG You began, you end, you do stuff?
MOBMAN That’s what I was looking for, man, the beginning and the end.
GREG Okay, I mean, I don’t know, it just sounds…
MOBMAN I already said it, too.
GREG …sounds pretty basic. That’s what I mean. People…
MOBMAN [Inaudible] So, you don’t even know basic stuff, man.
GREG I didn’t know that you were asking something. I was
trying to figure out what exactly you were asking.
MOBMAN I doubt you even — you actually program, ‘cause…
GREG Okay, well, how about we…
MOBMAN …you would know these things.
GREG We could program something in live time.
JACK We got the Euro to get back to. We don’t want to be spending our time programming here.
MOBMAN Exactly. [Crosstalk] [inaudible] …ask for actual proof.
GREG I’d be happy to share a screen and program.
MOBMAN …actual proof of something.
JACK So, Greg, what is your proof that you’re the creator of Sub7?
GREG I’m not — I don’t have any proof. I’m gonna let it…
MOBMAN Of course you don’t.
GREG …let it go.
MOBMAN I have multiple backup CDs that I burnt with multiple stages of
the source. I have a hoodie that I used to sell back then in the store. I took pictures of it. I have the source code. I have multiple proofs, man.
GREG Right, but I have the source code as well.
MOBMAN You don’t have anything.
GREG I have multiple copies of it on backup CDs and stuff that basically I
don’t even think — no longer even work. I don’t even have a CD drive anymore.
MOBMAN I was able to put all of it on…
GREG Yeah, I was able to pull them out, too, like ten years ago…
MOBMAN Where is it?
GREG …and show it to people.
MOBMAN Did you show it to anyone right now?
GREG Yeah. Well, not right now ‘cause I’m on a call right now with you guys,
and it’s not in person.
MOBMAN No, but like, come up with the actual proof, man.
GREG Yeah, and…
MOBMAN We have the whole source…
GREG Yes, and the reason I have the — yes, and I posted it…
MOBMAN You’re claiming that. You’re not showing it.
GREG It’s been on my GitHub for several years.
MOBMAN Where?
GREG On my GitHub.
MOBMAN At this point you’re just bullshitting,
‘cause there’s no GitHub. There’s no source. Or if there is, it’s definitely not the Sub7 source.
GREG Okay.
MOBMAN It’s zero, zero proof. It’s all talk. I have multiple things that I’ve put out there. I
gave them all to Ill Will and he posted them on his Twitter. There’s notes. There’s little handwritten notes with ideas, ‘cause I worked on this like, four years. I put a lot of hard work into it. This wasn’t just some script to fucking steal Ultima Online credit. Like, really, dude?
JACK So, Greg, you were telling me that you have control of the domain Sub7 crew.
GREG Mm-hm.
MOBMAN That’s the only actual proof he came forward — and that was never
actually owned by the real Mobman, never. It’s not documented anywhere. I never owned any domains back then ‘cause I was trying to stay anonymous. Everybody else was behind it. So, all he did is he bought an expired domain.
GREG So, in the credits, also there’s…
MOBMAN This is what — this is the proof he has.
GREG …there’s a Gmail account, as well.
JACK Okay, so…
MOBMAN There’s no Gmail account in the versions that I released.
JACK So, what did your e-mail come out in, like 2004?
MOBMAN Something like that.
JACK So, it didn’t — Sub7 in the nineties would not have — Gmail would — didn’t exist.
MOBMAN No, no.
JACK So, we’re talking about later versions at some point.
MOBMAN It’s a pretty long con. I’ll give you that. It’s, what, a decade now?
GREG It’s been longer than a decade, right?
MOBMAN …going to places and stuff?
GREG How long has it been?
MOBMAN There you go. It’s hilarious. I feel sorry for you, man. Like,
your biggest accomplishment is impersonating somebody else? I feel sorry for you.
GREG Well, I wouldn’t think of anything — of it as accomplishments, nor even writing a rap
back then, right? I don’t even tell pretty much anybody in person or any of that stuff.
MOBMAN Oh, is that why you go to all the conferences
saying you’re Mobman? You don’t even tell anyone?
GREG I don’t ‘cause a lot of people don’t even know what it is.
MOBMAN [Laughing] Ill Will has pictures of you at Defcons, multiple Defcons,
when you’re going around with Mobman and telling everybody you made Sub7, but now you’re saying you don’t tell people. Come on. Just come out with it. You know you want to. Come on.
JACK Well, like I said at the beginning, it’s tricky because…
MOBMAN It’s not tricky, Jack. Come on.
JACK …who wants to say that they’re the creator of this?
MOBMAN I’m saying it right now. I’m coming out and saying.
JACK Alright, you’re the creator.
MOBMAN Like, this guy’s a unknown…
GREG Well, be careful around Will, then. When he got arrested
and stuff — and a few other people got in trouble — taken down around him.
MOBMAN [Laughing] How is this related? Don’t change the subject.
GREG Well, I try not to make any absolute proof that could be used anywhere. So, it’s fine.
MOBMAN I’m making absolute proofs.
GREG I’m happy with saying I’m not — because I don’t even care…
MOBMAN So you’re happy coming out and saying the truth.
GREG So, I felt…
MOBMAN Are you going to stop going to places and claiming you’re Mobman? That’s all we want.
GREG Well, I’ve been saying I’m Mobman for the past — I’m trying to think how many years.
MOBMAN You can say you’re Mobman, just not the one that made Sub7. Big difference.
GREG How many years now?
MOBMAN Huge difference.
GREG How many…? I’m trying to count.
MOBMAN History needs to be set straight.
GREG ‘97, ‘95…
MOBMAN I appreciate you, Jack, for doing this right now.
GREG Twenty-four…
JACK [Laughing] He’s still doing the math. Greg, listen…
GREG Thirty years.
JACK …he’s saying you can continue using Mobman. Now, multiple people say — him the same name…
GREG When I’m on Call of Duty, people keep taking it.
JACK Yes, other Call of Duty users can use it, too. That’s not a copyrighted name.
GREG That’s not acceptable.
JACK But he’s asking you to stop claiming that you’re the creator of Sub7.
MOBMAN Exactly. Can we agree on that? Come on. You know you want to. You’ve been living a lie.
GREG Well, I don’t claim it in person anymore to anybody. I don’t even claim it at all. So,
that’s easy to do. We could do that.
MOBMAN If anybody — for the listeners out there, right, if you think you can challenge me or
anything like that or if you knew me from back in the day, just send a message. We’ll talk it out. I’m not hiding anything. I can show all the stuff that I talked about, the CDs — I still have the hoodie. I can put in pictures. I can meet you up if you come over here. I’m still in Windsor, still in Windsor, Ontario. If you’re ever around Detroit, it’s right across the road.
JACK I’m confused if you’re asking to fight
someone or if you’re asking to prove that you’re the real Mobman.
MOBMAN To prove, to see the proof, to see the proof. If anybody wants to challenge
me in any way or wants to actually see all this stuff that I’m talking about. I didn’t think you were gonna show up, honestly, ‘cause, really, what could you have said?
GREG Why? Why wouldn’t I show up?
MOBMAN Because you’re being outed,
‘cause you’re being outed for how much bullshit you’ve been spewing.
GREG What does it matter? Why would I care if somebody disputes it or not?
MOBMAN That’s what this whole thing was about. [Crosstalk]
GREG They did dispute it for like a decade.
MOBMAN Because they saw through your bullshit.
GREG And then, yeah, it took them a decade to get all the bullshit together to call me
out of the — from something from thirty years ago that I don’t even care about.
MOBMAN For something you don’t care about, you sure as hell spent a lot of
time and effort. This isn’t just some fad you mentioned once or twice. [Crosstalk]
GREG How much time and effort do you think?
MOBMAN This is a decade.
GREG I mean, do you like, monitor my social medias or something?
JACK Well, personally, I don’t like you telling me that you did something that
you didn’t do. That looks bad for me on my show and my credibility.
MOBMAN Exactly. You’ve been going around giving interviews as the author of Sub7. How is that not
effort put into it? You’ve been going to Defcon conferences. It’s a long-running con, man.
JACK The reason why I believed it is because
of that damn Rolling Stone article saying that you were.
MOBMAN Yeah, nobody faults you for this.
JACK Rolling Stone had — must have fact-checked it, so I think this must be legit.
GREG Well, so that’s when the source code was. So,
I had the source code back then on whatever computer I was using.
MOBMAN You’re really going with this, man? Really? What source code? Why are you — why
do you keep going back to it? I thought we agreed on you’re not gonna claim that no more.
GREG Well, do you want me to explain the story of…
MOBMAN What are you still trying to prove?
GREG …what happened and how I was able to prove it back then to the…?
MOBMAN You said Sub7 source, so I’m not gonna let you bullshit right now, ‘cause that’s not
the Sub7 source. That has never left my hands until it was released by Ill Will on GitHub. Never. You’ll not find a copy of it anywhere in the world on any website, on any backup, except the ones I have. So, as soon as you said Sub7 source, like, no, dude, stop. You gotta stop.
JACK Okay, but I want to hear what — how you got
the Rolling Stone article. You were about to say something about how all that started.
GREG Right. So, we sat down in a room and I had my laptop;
opened it up, pulled up the source code of it, compiled it, and showed it around and showed the hash matched the ones that you can download from the website and all that, so…
MOBMAN …was involved in any way back then…
GREG Where were you? What happened to you during those years? Were you arrested,
too, or did you go to prison, or…?
MOBMAN …knew right away it was all bullshit if they listened to you in any way.
GREG Okay.
JACK Our conversation began getting circular and we started talking over each other at that
point. So, I ended the call. But I think we got a half-assed confession out of Greg, didn’t we? He said he’d stop saying he’s the author of Sub7, and we’ll let it go. It was hard to hear that, but he did say that. So, I think that’s the best I’m gonna get from him, and I’ll have to take that. Oh, and I looked up Greg’s birthday on his arrest record, and it shows October 27, not October 15, like he said a moment ago. But honestly, I’m not too upset about this. In fact, I knew this would happen eventually. I grew up in the same culture as these guys, right; on IRC, downloading viruses, pranking people with tools. I remember once that I was in a computer class and the teacher had his computer connected
to a projector which was projecting on the front of the class, and I sent a network message to his machine which made a pop-up show for the whole class. It was epic for a teenager. One thing I know about this culture is just how much hackers like to mess with the press. Cult of the Dead Cow in particular learned that the press will publish just about anything that a hacker says. If you’re in a hacker group and you say, oh, we hacked NASA, the press will just take your word for it and publish it. So, they started creating all these wild claims to see how far the news would spread just to mess with everyone. Later on, 4chan picked up on this, too, trying to get fake news to spread, also. So, this culture is big on
simply messing with the media, and it’s partly just to show how crappy the media is for getting it wrong and how gullible people are. I mean, look at the whole Birds Aren’t Real movement, right? I’m sure you’ve heard someone say that, birds aren’t real. That whole thing was just created to prove how conspiracy theories and misinformation is so easily spread.
So, I know the people I talk to, hackers, are known for giving misinformation, which means I have to be allergic to conspiracy theories in order to navigate this effectively and to bring you the most factual podcast I can. To do that, I have to really know my history and understanding of tech and the scene to be ready for anything coming my way. So, I guess I’m saying I’m not surprised that someone at some point pulled one over on me, but man, this was quite a long con, wasn’t it? This is elaborate to have your friends vouch for you and to have all this proof that you were the creator of Sub7. Wow. I’m more impressed than I’m mad at this point. Greg messaged me after that call and wanted another call with me. He
wanted to apologize to me if he caused any problems, and I started to record the call.
GREG It’s no disrespect to you or anybody else that I’ve — if they felt hurt or betrayed or
lied to or whatever. It’s nothing personal. It’s none of that. Like I was telling you, I respect your craft and everything, and it’s good that you actually [inaudible]. As I was going through all this stuff with you the other — I’m thinking of all this stuff; I’m like, man, if I actually reflect back and look at it, all the shit that the stupid Sub7 story — that I’d done — I mean, I went to Capital One. I went to Facebook. I went to these businesses to interview, and — on the impression of, oh, this guy wrote Sub7. Let’s interview him. Let’s fly him up here to Virginia at our headquarters, give him a badge, bring him in, interview him and do all this stuff with him. So, in a nutshell, that’s pretty good social fucking engineering to get
all the way — to do that. I mean, into one of the biggest financial institutes.
JACK It’s true.
GREG [Laughing] So, I think of things like that, right? It’s like,
yeah. Then using that noriety [?] where these kids that are coming out or whoever, right — and they listen. They heed my advice. I tell them, don’t screw up your life like I did.
JACK That’s a great way to end this whole episode.
GREG [Laughing]
JACK Don’t be like my man.
GREG Not my fake [inaudible].
(Outro): [Outro music] A big thanks to Ill Will, the real Mobman, and Greg, for being good sports and taking us on this wild adventure. This episode was created by me, Mr. Packet Loss, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the infinite loop lover, Tristan Ledger, mixing done by Proximity Sound, and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Why do server rooms often have raised floors? So that technicians can get under the server rack and get to the root of the problem. This is Darknet Diaries.
