50 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM

PHOTOS BY T.J. KIRKPATRICK/REDUX; HATS BY MACROVECTOR/SHUTTERSTOCK

ONE WINTER

MORNING in 2015,

as he left for work

from his home in

Silver Spring, Md.,

Jonathan Margulies

pushed the button

on his remote to close

his garage door. Nothing

happened. He tried again. Nothing.

The motor was shot.

He ended up replacing it with a

“smart” opener that not only lifted and

lowered the door, but also connected

to the internet. With a swipe on a

smartphone, Margulies could operate

the opener, and if he left the door

open, the opener would send him a

text. He could close it from anywhere.

It’s particularly appealing to people

like Margulies, who occasionally

panic, in the crush of rush hour, that

they’ve left their homes wide open and

defenseless. To some, the smart opener

may seem a godsend.

But Margulies, 36, isn’t just any

consumer. For more than a decade,

he’s worked as a cybersecurity

expert, doing vulnerability and

security assessments for Sandia

National Laboratories and the

National Institute of Standards and

Technology, and more recently, for

the U.S. Department of Justice. One

area of his expertise is identifying

security flaws in a company’s digital

infrastructure or product by thinking

and acting like malicious hackers.

Identifying security flaws is the

first step in ethical hacking, where

good-guy hackers — the kind you

want on your side — use what they

learn to improve electronic security.

They tend to be obsessive, passionate

and sleep-deprived. When they see

cracks in the virtual world, they want

to peek through to discover what’s on

the other side.

They’re becoming increasingly

important, and visible: In May, another

good-guy hacker, an attentive 22-year-

old in the U.K., spotted an unfolding

global cyberattack named WannaCry

and successfully stopped the attack.

For these “white hat” hackers, the

key to building a successful defense is

to find weaknesses and fix them before

someone else breaks in. Given the

ubiquity of online communication,

plugging security flaws is critical

at all scales, whether it’s protecting

someone’s bank account or, say,

preventing the hacking of political

An internet-connected garage door opener sent cybersecurity expert Jonathan Margulies on a

hacker’s journey to figure out how vulnerable his home was with the convenient new device.

campaigns to influence a national

election.

Margulies acknowledges he’s not a

great hacker — he’s better at identifying

security vulnerabilities than actually

replicating the destructive coding and

social engineering tactics of malicious

hackers. But searching for electronic

fault lines is still second nature, even

when he’s not at work. “You can’t help

trying to break things all the time,” he

says. So, there he was, in 2015, with

a brand-new gizmo in hand, a new

system to break.

He wanted to know: How vulnerable

is this new garage door opener? Could

someone hack it and enter uninvited?

A smart opener connects to his home

network, so just as a burglar who gets

into a house could rummage from room

to room, a malicious intruder who’s

taken control of the garage door could

access every other connected device in

the home — phones, televisions, laptops

and all their data.

It’s home invasion, in bed with

identify theft.

So Margulies began to map fatal flaws

in his new opener’s digital design. Could

he, effectively, break into his own house?

HACK ALL THE THINGS!

Security experts are both thrilled

and anxious about the internet of

things (IoT), the ever-growing collection

BLACK HAT

BAD

GRAY HAT

NEUTRAL

WHITE HAT

GOOD

WHAT’S ALL THIS ABOUT HATS?

Originating from the

sartorial choices of

cowboys in old Westerns,

“bad guy” hackers are

known as black hats and

“good guys” as white hats.

Hackers who occupy the

space in between became

known as gray hats.

O