“Kayla played a crucial role, posing as HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund to an IT administrator (who happened to be Nokia security specialist Jussi Jaakonaho) to gain access to the company’s servers. Read their email correspondence here and here. In the fallout, Barr’s emails revealed HBGary had proposed a dirty tricks campaign against WikiLeaks to a law firm representing Bank of America. Other security firms distanced themselves. Kayla and her buddies had opened a can of worms.” - × × ×

“How did this mystery girl become a hacker? Kayla says that’s down to her dad, a software engineer who won custody over her after a divorce that deemed him the “more ’stable’ parent.” They moved to the countryside where others her age were few and far between. The house was meanwhile littered with programming books on Linux kernel, Intel manuals and networking books. “I just started reading them,” she says. By the time Kayla was 14 she could fully program C and x86 assembly.” - × × ×