Myspace Tom's FBI file

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Subject: Myspace Tom's FBI file

MySpace Cofounder Tom Anderson Was A Real Life “WarGames” Hacker in 1980s


by Michael Arrington on August 30, 2008

Late last year we discovered that MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson, arguably the most popular individual on the Internet with 240+ million MySpace friends (he is added by default to every MySpace account) was actually 37 years old, not the 32 that he continues to claim on his MySpace page.

Now we’ve learned a much more colorful part of Anderson’s history: In 1985, when he was fourteen and in high school in Escondido, California, Anderson was subject to one of the largest FBI raids in California history after hacking into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system and subsequently showing his friends how to do it. He was never arrested because he was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of his computer equipment and some newspaper accounts of the incident stated incorrectly (see image below from a 1986 LA Times story) that he was “convicted in federal court of computer hacking and placed on probation” (the statements were corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson used the hacker name “Lord Flathead.”

MySpace and Anderson would not comment on this post. But most of the information is now available online as news articles from the 1980s (and earlier) have been added to Google and other search engines. We came across an initial article accidentally and started investigating from there. Some of the information in this post has been obtained by a source close to Anderson, including the connection between Anderson and his hacker name.

Full article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/30/myspace-cofounder-tom-anderson-was-a-real-life-wargames-hacker-in-1980s/