by Tim Stevens |
While stories inspired by reality always take some liberties with the truth, the new prime-time drama “Scorpion” has its roots in a real person: genius hacker Walter O’Brien. We visited the set of the show to speak with him and get the inside story on the show’s creation.
When I was 13, I thought I was pretty hot stuff because knew BASIC programming, self-taught on the family’s Commodore 64. One of my crowning accomplishments was writing a silly little program that showed a crudely-drawn Space Shuttle lifting off in a cloud of pixelated smoke.
When computer security expert Walter O’Brien was 13, he found his way into NASA’s servers on the ARPANET (the DARPA-funded predecessor to the internet). Once in, he downloaded the CAD files for the real Space Shuttle Columbia. He printed them, hung them on his wall…and later was met at home by a fleet of black cars driven by very serious individuals from the US government who all wanted to know how he’d managed to compromise a supposedly secure system.
Bypassing barriers and finding novel solutions to problems, then, came early to O’Brien, who would go on to be known by the handle Scorpion across the Internet’s various highways, byways, and seedy chatrooms. That handle would later be applied to his computer security firm, Scorpion Computer Services, and is now being repurposed again for a new prime-time drama from CBS. (Complete with some cutsey mock-XML markup in the logo.)