[ HITB ] Inside The Billion-Dollar Hacker Club

For this group of old friends, assembled for an impromptu reunion, the venue would feel familiar: an online chat room running on a secure private server. Each were former members of the elite hacking group “w00w00” and they had reconvened that afternoon to celebrate and share in the success of one of their own. In some ways it was just like old times.

But rather than success being the discovery of a new software exploit or penetration of a computer network, this was something more extraordinary. One of the group’s former members had just sold their company for $19 billion.