PERSONAL BACKGROUND
- NAME: Matthew Bevan
- WHERE: Cardiff Wales
- OCCUPATION: Hacker
Mathew Bevan is a British hacker from Cardiff, Wales. In 1996 he was arrested for hacking into secure US government networks under the handle or codename Kuji. At the age of 21, he hacked into US military network systems and gained access to their files such as the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the Griffiss Air Force Base Research Laboratory, and NASA. Intent on proving a UFO Conspiracy Theory; his sole tool was a Commodore Amiga loaded with a blueboxing program called Roxbox. He was one of two hackers said to have “nearly started a third world war” according to Supervisory Special Agent Jim Christy, at the time working for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Bullied by his peers, Mathew had a difficult time with school and turned to the online world at night for an escape. Having been told ways to negate the phone system, he could call anywhere in the world without charges appearing on his bill.
On June 21, 1996 he was arrested in connection with hacking incidents relating to several sensitive USAF, NASA and NATO establishments. The United States Senate had already misinterpreted the situation and branded Mathew’s pseudonym Kuji as a “Foreign Agent, possibly of Eastern European origin”. After 36 hours of interviews with police, he was charged with intent to secure access to computer systems belonging to the US Air Force and defense manufacturer Lockheed.
A US Air Force investigator summed up the risks and concerns brought about by their hacking, how Bevan’s alleged partner Richard Pryce (Datastream Cowboy), then 16 years old, hacked his way into a research facility in Korea, and dumped the contents of the Korean Atomic Research Institute’s database on the USAF system.
White, grey or black hat hacker?
He can be regarded as a grey hat hacker because although his intent was mainly personal and did no harm to the US military based networks still, the way he did it was illegal and was unknown by the administrators who were in charge of those systems. In the process he also actually kind of helped the system because he pointed out that there were no passwords he needed to access the so called “secured files” and the only information he “sniffed” were the account log-in information of the administrators.
Where is he now?
After the case, Bevan became an ethical hacker and security consultant, first with Tiger Computer Security, a software developer of Nintendo Co., Ltd. and later on a freelance basis with his firm the Kuji Media Corporation, a professional software development center based on electronic security systems and legal businesses.
