William Genovese
William Genovese is a former greyhat hacker turned security professional, who goes by the alias illwill.
Early Career and illmob
William Genovese, operating under the alias illwill, came to prominence in the early 2000s as a central figure in a loose-knit group of computer hackers known as illmob. He ran illmob.org, a security community website that became associated with several notable incidents in the computer security landscape of that era.
Website Controversies
In 2003, illmob.org became the first site to publish zero-day exploit code targeting the MS03-026 Windows RPC vulnerability. That code was subsequently used by unknown parties to develop variants of the W32/Blaster Worm. In response to the worm's spread, Genovese developed and released a removal tool for infected Windows machines.
In 2004, federal authorities charged Genovese with Theft of a Trade Secret under US Code Title 18, Section 1832, stemming from his sale of incomplete Windows NT/2000 Microsoft source code to Microsoft investigators and federal agents. Prosecutors applied the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, a law that had more commonly been handled through private civil litigation. The source code in question had already been widely distributed on the internet prior to Genovese's sale.
In 2005, illmob.org posted leaked images and contact data obtained from Paris Hilton's T-Mobile Sidekick phone. The data had been acquired by a fellow hacker through a combination of social engineering and exploitation of a vulnerability in a BEA WebLogic Server database function, which allowed remote file access via specially crafted web requests. BEA had issued a patch for the flaw in March 2003, which T-Mobile had not applied. The site was also referenced in news coverage connected to the leak of a sex tape belonging to Fred Durst, which had been stolen from his personal email account.
Transition to Security Consulting
Beginning in 2008, Genovese repositioned himself as a professional security consultant, public speaker, and educator. His consulting work encompasses penetration testing, phishing assessments, OSINT-based threat intelligence, and mitigation services for companies worldwide. He is also a contributor to the Metasploit project, the widely used open-source penetration testing framework.
NESIT Hackerspace
From 2010 until his resignation in 2016, Genovese co-founded and served as a board member of NESIT, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit hackerspace based in Connecticut. Through NESIT, he offered free community classes covering network security, personal internet safety, reverse engineering, embedded electronics, 3D printing, and design. He also helped establish a virtualized penetration testing lab, built in part with a large server farm donation from a pharmaceutical company, enabling users to practice offensive security techniques in a controlled environment.
Conferences and Community Involvement
Genovese co-founded and spoke at the security conferences eXcon and BSides Connecticut (BSidesCT), with appearances in 2011, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. In 2015, he participated as a panelist at DEF CON 23 in Las Vegas, taking part in a charity fundraiser organized to support a fellow hacker diagnosed with terminal cancer.
