Mukarram Khalid, the man behind Mak Man

25-year-old telecom engineer from Lahore says his employer had 'no idea' of his secret cyber life and his recent exploits

“My friends used to call me Mak Man. It was like a nick name,” says Mukarram Khalid.

Khalid is the man behind the hack handle Mak Man, which has caught the imagination of the cyberspace over the last couple of days exposing cracks in the information security architecture of Gaana.com, a music download portal run by media behemoth Timesgroup.

“In 2007, there was a fierce cyber war going on between Pakistan and Indian hackers. I followed some of the hacked websites and found their origin. I found their forums/blogs and Facebook profiles. At that time, I stepped into this cyber world with a hack-handle Mak Man. I guess, I was afraid of being stalked or tracked down,” Khalid said recalling origins of his alias.

The 25-year-old, who hails from Sialkot, close to the Jammu border in India and lives in Lahore, graduated in Electrical (telecom) Engineering from University of Central Punjab in 2012. He works as a network engineer in well known telecom solution provider. “Currently, I’m working with different employers at the same time, some of them knew about all this. But my actual day job employer (Telecom Solution Providers) had no idea,” Khalid quips.

 

Hours after the Gaana.com issue was resolved amicably, a Delhi-based student entrepreneur Pranav Mishra claimed to have tracked down the real identity of Mak Man. “I first traced his email id and wrote a mail to him. Once he opened the email, I could trace his IP address. That is how I identified Mak man’s real name,” Mishra told Business Standard. Mishra claimed that he messaged Times Internet chief Satyan Gajwani and asked for recognition. “Satyan sir told me to contact next week,” Mishra said.

However, Khalid says though his employer had no idea, his identity was not a big secret in the hacker community. “My real identity was never a mystery. Most of my facebook friends (from different countries) already knew my name and address. I have even met most of them personally. Plus, I always posted my research on Vimeo with my real name,” the techie who calls himself a ‘white hat hacker’ said. Being a ‘White Hat’, internet slang for ethical hackers, Khalid says he has not got into any real trouble with his targets. “No, not really. I never did actual damage to any of my targets and all the hacks I’ve pulled so far, had very genuine motives.”

But his fake identity ran into trouble with Facebook. “Some guys mass reported my facebook profile @ facebook.com/themakmaniac against facebook’s fake name policy. FB team took notice and blocked the account. I’ve applied for the restoration of the account but it’s under consideration. But my twitter account @themakmaniac is still active.”

Though he has got into trouble with Facebook, Khalid counts tech giants of the world, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google among his sources of inspitation. “I won’t say that I’m an expert but I like to apply every piece of information I get one way or another. I’m a huge fan of computer programming and I love to automate stuff with simple scripts and code snippets. I have good knowledge of PHP, Python and C#.”

Among his many jobs, Khalid has also been working with a friend called Sajjad Ahmed. Ahmed, who was part of Mak man’s social media interactions with Gajwani, runs a security solutions provider called Refluxes. “We have worked on a few projects, Our last project was penetration testing and Code auditing of tune.pk (One of the largest video streaming websites of Pakistan). I have also worked with rozee.pk (one of the largest job portals in Pakistan) as a security auditor in the past.”

Apart from his interest in info-sec research, Khalid likes watching movies and playing online video games. “I'm very good at Counter strike 1.6 (Multi Player Online Game).” 

For youngsters having interest in infosec, Khalid has some advice: “Start with the basics of programming. I believe if you know how to make something, You'll know how to break it.”