WhatsApp founder celebrated sale with woowoo gang

SAN FRANCISCO: A few days after selling WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion, Jan Koum stepped into a suite at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco to celebrate with old friends, including CEOs, reformed hackers and a few people who fell into both those camps.

Conducted over snacks and beer, the late-night festivity was a spontaneous reunion of a security super-group that had come to Koum's aid in 2000 as he grappled with a denial-of-service attack that knocked Yahoo offline when Koum was responsible for security there. The now defunct collective known as w00w00 (pronounced whoo whoo) had thrived on Internet Relay Chat channels in the late 1990s and early 2000s, between get-togethers at hacking conventions such as Def Con in Las Vegas, where a member said Koum "came across like a big, friendly kid."