A Vigilante Hacker Took Down North Korea’s Internet. Now He’s Taking Off His Mask
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A little over two years have passed since the online vigilante who would call himself P4x fired the first shot in his own one-man cyberwar. Working alone in his coastal Florida home in late January of 2022, wearing slippers and pajama pants and periodically munching on Takis corn snacks, he spun up a set of custom-built programs on his laptop and a collection of cloud-based servers that intermittently tore offline every publicly visible website in North Korea and would ultimately keep them down for more than a week.
P4x’s real identity, revealed here for the first time, is Alejandro Caceres, a 38-year-old Colombian-American cybersecurity entrepreneur with hacker tattoos on both arms, unruly dark brown hair, a very high tolerance for risk, and a very personal grudge. Like many other US hackers and security researchers, Caceres had been personally targeted by North Korean spies who aimed to steal his intrusion tools. He …
P4x’s real identity, revealed here for the first time, is Alejandro Caceres, a 38-year-old Colombian-American cybersecurity entrepreneur with hacker tattoos on both arms, unruly dark brown hair, a very high tolerance for risk, and a very personal grudge. Like many other US hackers and security researchers, Caceres had been personally targeted by North Korean spies who aimed to steal his intrusion tools. He …