He took an IT job with a health insurance company and spent three unfulfilling years there until a friend took him to a career fair in 1996. There, Johnny landed an engineering position at Computer Sciences Corp., or CSC, a long-established technology giant with offices around the world and headquarters in California.
Within months, he and a select few at CSC banded together to create StrikeForce, their version of good-guy hacker heaven.
`Adrenaline rush'
You've seen their ilk in the movies: a secretive team of tech-savvy super sleuths who use their skills to sneak into off-limit areas and snatch some kind of treasure, usually cash or state secrets. But StrikeForce only sneaked into places to prove it could be done.
Not that its agents don't use stealth and subterfuge.
"You have to go in and convince somebody you belong there, then talk the talk and walk the walk and bypass the controls," said Jason T. Arnold, one of five StrikeForce founders.
The group was among the first real-world crews of cyber-security experts. They were paid to physically break into offices, through cunning rather than force, and crack computer systems to show where the weaknesses were and how to fix them. Their clients included federal agencies and private organizations, for whom StrikeForce helped secure systems and prevent data leaks. The group also developed CSC's first software product - an automated attack tool.
Generally, to be a member of StrikeForce was to feel superior and pretty cool on a daily basis.
Arnold's focus was on network protocols and security. Another guy was good at applications and a third the software expert. Johnny was into the "attack and penetration part," Arnold said. "He was the one most passionate about that."
They used to watch movies, Sneakers and The Matrix and the like, to get pumped for jobs. Then they'd go in, using fake badges and phony identities to fool guards and receptionists and bypass computer firewalls and other so-called safety measures.
For Johnny, it was a meteoric high.
"There was such an incredible adrenaline rush, any criminal will tell you. It was just phenomenal, the rush of breaking into a place, the rush of beating their firewalls," he says.
This is what Johnny does best - hunt for weaknesses. He scans people for clues about their lives, computers for access codes taped to their keyboards, employee badges for work details and the TV sets in hotel rooms for ways to unlock restricted channels (which eventually led to his viewing customer bills, e-mails and movies through the television).
