Gummo, a former blackhat hacker, has recently revealed that he owns a bitcoin fortune worth a whopping $7 billion.
During a new interview on Soft White Underbelly, a documentary series channel on YouTube, Gummo revealed that he has amassed a great deal of wealth from his bitcoin stash.
“I am quite wealthy… I do not have to work if I do not choose to. I have over $7 billion worth of bitcoin,” he said.
Estimating his bitcoin fortune to be worth over $7 billion, would mean that Gummo has more than 179 bitcoins based on the digital asset’s current price. At the time of writing, one BTC was trading at $39,050.
From a Blackhat to a Whitehat Hacker
Gummo’s story first appeared on Soft White Underbelly earlier in December 2020. During the interview, he discussed his early life and how he had been a hacker for over 36 years.
Coming from a low-income home with a single parent, Gummo revealed that he had a rough upbringing. Things took a turn for the worse when his mom died when he was only 12 years old.
He quickly found a profound love for computers and soon, Gummo had developed a set of hacking skills. He became a hacker and leveraged his comprehensive knowledge of defeating secure networks and physical vectors to commit countless cybercrimes.
However, it all came crashing down when law enforcement agencies tracked him down for selling a satellite software worth $20 million, which he split equally with his partner.
Gummo was faced with the option of either getting sentenced for his crimes or using his hacking skills to help improve the technology that he hacked by acting as a consultant to developers.
He chose the latter and became a whitehat hacker, helping software companies improve on their technologies and tracking down the “bad guys”. With his deep understanding of cryptocurrencies, Gumbo was able to build four supercomputers that mined over 80,000 BTC.
His skills had also helped him to create highly secured networks for trading and hedge funds. These high capacity systems are still being used up to today within some of the leading high-frequency algorithmic trading platforms.
Cybercrimes on the Increase
In the latest interview, Gummo pointed out that bad players on the internet continue to devise new strategies as the digital scene evolves. True, in recent times, the rate of cyber crimes have skyrocketed.
Earlier this year, hackers stole more than $80 million from the DeFi project, Qubit Finance. Popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea, also recently suffered an attack that resulted in the theft of several valuable NFTs.
