I started teaching myself the Fortran and Basic programming languages. After only a few weeks of computer class, I wrote a program to steal people’s passwords: a student trying to sign on saw what looked like the familiar login banner but was actually my program masquerading as the operating system, designed to trick users into entering their account and password (similar to phishing attacks today). Actually, one of the CSUN lab monitors had given me a hand debugging my code—they thought it was a lark that this high schooler had figured out how to steal passwords. Once the little program was up and running on the terminals in the lab, whenever a student logged in, his or her username and password were secretly recorded in a file.