Kubecka's Puerto Rican mother became a roboticsprogrammer and lacking money for daycare would take Kubecka to work with her. Kubecka said she "fell in love with programming" when she programmed a haunted house on the screen to say "boo". She learned to program and at the age of 10 hacked the US Department of Justice. At 18, she began working for the US Air Force.[2][3][4]
Saudi Aramco security work
In 2012, Saudi Aramco's network experienced one of the worst hacks in history and Kubecka was contacted then contracted to get the company's systems back up and running. Kubecka explained that the Saudi Aramco network was flat so hackers were able to roll through quickly and infected close to 35,000 of its computers.[5][6][7][8] Facing the emergency and immediately following the hardware attack, Saudi Aramco purchased 50,000 computer hard disk drives (off a production line).[9]
Cyber Terrorism work
In 2014, Kubecka fixed an email and rootkit attack on the Royal Saudi Arabian Embassy in The Hague, Netherlands.[10][11] The first phase of the attack was caused by a weak email password of 123456 used on the official business embassy email. An Embassy insider and ISIS collaborator attempted to extort money from Prince Mohammed bin Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz, Sumaya Alyusuf and from the Royal Saudi Arabian Embassy of The Hague. During the second phase of the attack, the insider sent an extortion demand of 25,000 USD each from several Middle Eastern and Turkish Embassies. The third phase of the attack was caused by the Diplomatic Corps sending a warning notification to all The Hague embassies via email using CC not BCC, exposing the other official embassy email accounts to the attacker. During the fourth phase of the attack, the insider taunted the Diplomatic Corps, The Hague embassies and hacked into the Secretary to the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia personal Gmail account. The attacker rose the extortion demand to $35,000,000, then to $50,000,000 saying ISIS would destroy the Kurhaus of Scheveningen during the planned National Saudi Day celebrations to which over 400 dignitaries had been invited.[citation needed]
After the Shamoon attack and Dutch Embassy hacks, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Saudi Aramco made security a top priority. Stanford University signed an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with one of the security colleges of Saudi Arabia in 2018.[12][13][14]
