● Wired 📅 23/04/2026 à 12:00

Cybersécurité 👤 Jennifer Swann

🏷️ Tags : cert edr free open source intelligence pto rag rte rust surveillance

Save this storySave this storySafiyya was sound asleep at her parents’ apartment when the unthinkable happened. It was almost midnight on a Monday last September, and her phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. She got out of bed and went over to her computer, her body pulsing with adrenaline. Messages were pouring in on the Discord server she moderated. She began to panic.“What the fuck is happening,” one Discord user wrote in the general chat. “Yall i cant go to sleep now,” wrote another. “Dude I have school tmr,” someone else chimed in. “Daddy d4vd may be getting canceled,” a separate user wrote.“D4vd slimed someone,” another user said—slang for murdered.The Discord server known as “d4vd’s closet,” for fans of the Soundcloud-native singer-songwriter D4vd, was processing horrific news in real time. Hours earlier, on the afternoon of September 8, a decomposing body had been discovered in the front trunk of a black Tesla in a Los Angeles tow yard. It was registered, in Texas, to then-20-year-old David Anthony Burke, the real name of D4vd.Safiyya, who is 24 and lives in Canada, was near speechless. (She, like many sources in this piece, asked to be identified by either a username, pseudonym, or first name, out of fear of harassment.) “Bro wtf,” she typed into the Discord general chat, her hands shaking. “Just wtfff.” It wasn’t just the gruesome headlines that rattled her. This real-life homicide eerily paralleled the fictional ones depicted in D4vd’s song lyrics and music videos. There was, most obviously, his 2022 breakout hit, “Romantic Homicide,” a moody electronic ballad that Safiyya had first discovered, like so many others, as a viral earworm on TikTok. In the music video, D4vd—dressed as “Itami,” his murderous, blindfolded alter ego—stands in front of a woman’s lifeless, blood-splattered body; a knife drops from his hand.Then there was the 2025 music video for “One More Dance,” which evokes a 1990s horror movie à la The Blair Witch Project. The opening scene shows Itami, again played by D4vd, dragging his own body across the ground, dumping it in front of a car, and watching as friends stuff it in the trunk. The video culminates with his friends burying him alive in an open grave. Now D4vd’s fans wondered in the Discord server: Was D4vd’s art imitating his life, or was it the other way around?“D4vd didn’t kill someone itami did,” one user wrote. “He was trying to tell us all along,” wrote another who posted an image of a particularly catchy lyric from “Romantic Homicide”:“In the back of my mind, I killed you.”To get around copyright strikes on YouTube, D4vd used a mobile app called Bandlab and royalty-free beats to create viral earworms.Photograph: Christopher Polk/Getty ImagesSafiyya joined D4vd’s Discord more than two years earlier. She liked the song “Romantic Homicide,” but more importantly, her crush, whom she’d met while playing a first-person shooter game called Valorant, claimed to be a friend of D4vd’s. When she sent her first message, a simple “ello” in May 2023, she found that others were eager to engage. The server was one giant, constantly active group chat, but with strangers from all over the world. It felt chaotic, unwieldy. Shitposting—a language Safiyya was well versed in from spending years in gaming-related Discord servers—was pervasive.Things didn’t work out with her crush, but Safiyya liked staying up late after work and chatting with the thousands of people in D4vd’s Discord. She didn’t know much about anyone beyond their avatars and usernames, and it didn’t matter—the conversation almost always circled back to what they all had in common: D4vd’s music. Members debated their favorite tracks (Safiyya’s was “Sleep Well,” a lo-fi R&B love song), compared merch, and shared tour dates they planned to attend.Safiyya was so active in the chat that, after just a few months, a moderator asked if she’d like to join their ranks. The unpaid role came with a lot of pressure. Seven mods were expected to post at least 500 messages a week. It was a way to encourage engagement, Safiyya says. All the time she put into the Discord server was worth it: She wasn’t just a part of D4vd’s community, she was a curator of it.In the early hours of September 9, though, Safiyya started to resent her role as moderator. She didn’t like being one of the adults in the room, tasked with wrangling an out-of-control conversation. There was confusion, pandemonium, and, as one might expect from extremely online Zoomers posting on Discord, there were jokes—many in exceptionally poor taste. Some speculated that D4vd had been framed, that the news was fake, or that this was all promo for the forthcoming album D4vd had been teasing incessantly on social media.As anxious as Safiyya felt, discussing a murder case in real time—one involving a suspect that everyone had at least a parasocial relationship with—was also kind of thrilling. Safiyya was close enough to D4vd that they had each other’s cell phone numbers. He’d even FaceTimed her once to ask for help deleting a Twitch livestream. (Safiyya was on another call and missed it.) She liked D4vd, of course, and felt protective of his career.Initially, Safiyya thought there was no way D4vd could’ve been involved. He’d just played a show in Chicago, and she figured someone must have borrowed or stolen his car while he was out of town. To her, it seemed like an injustice that this would happen just as D4vd was about to become a world-famous superstar: He was two weeks away from playing the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, before headlining a European tour the following month, capping off a dizzying year in which he also made his Coachella debut. Guilty or not, Safiyya knew the damage had been done.D4vd performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2025.Photograph: Scott Dudelson/Getty Images“Tour finna get cancel 💔💔” Safiyya posted in the general chat of the Discord server. A short while later, in all caps, her frustration boiled over: “This boi got collab left and right just for this shit to happen.”Soon, the grave reality of the situation began to sink in. “We’re finna end up in a documentary,” one user posted, around 2:15 am. By 7 am, the speculation in D4vd’s Discord server had become so rampant that moderators disabled new posts. Safiyya was scared, feeling as if she’d suddenly been thrust into a criminal investigation.Over the next several days, D4vd’s remaining tour dates would get canceled, just as Safiyya had predicted; so would the deluxe version of his first studio album, initially slated for release on September 19. His just-launched fashion campaign with Hollister and Crocs would get canned; and the Grammy-winning singer Kali Uchis would pull her duet with D4vd from streaming platforms. It seemed to many of D4vd’s former fans that his arrest for murder would be imminent too.When it wasn’t, they took matters into their own hands. Overwhelmed by a sense of urgency, onetime D4vd stans began combing through his Discord server, suspecting it contained information so incriminating that it was only a matter of time before it got wiped. In the end, even Safiyya couldn’t have imagined how quickly many of her peers turned against their favorite musician, splintering and spiraling into a feverish—and often personal—quest for justice.Like most people his age, David Burke grew up on the internet and learned from a young age how to weaponize it. He was born in 2005, the same year YouTube launched, and has been posting videos to the platform since at least the age of 13—around the same time he moved with his devout Christian family from Queens, New York, to a middle-class suburb of Houston. Some of his earliest uploads are screen recordings of his plays on Fortnite, a battle-royale-style video game he was obsessed with. They offered him the attention and social interaction he seemed to be otherwise lacking.“He was grinding. He was posting every day, playing every day, he was trying his hardest to get somewhere,” says a 21-year-old New York–based gamer who goes by the username Sacred WTF. “Bro, I would just wake up sometimes and it would just be multiple posts from him. He was just trying to pop off, just get one good video.”By 2021, D4vd was 16 and already building a brand as a socially awkward outcast who spent nearly all of his time online. (It helped that he was homeschooled.) Sometimes, it paid off: When he started catering to the YouTube algorithm by adding popular songs to his Fortnite videos, they racked up hundreds of thousands of views and generated “a lot of money” in ad revenue, he’d later tell musician Benny Blanco in an interview. But those massive views also brought copyright strikes—warnings from YouTube, prompted by record labels, to remove the songs or risk getting booted from the platform. That’s when, according to the now mythic origin story that D4vd has relayed in the press, his mom had a life-altering suggestion: Why didn’t her son make his own damn music?Using his iPhone, a pair of earbuds, and a mobile app called Bandlab, D4vd—he adopted the moniker around this time, in part for search engine optimization—huddled in his sister’s closet and recorded himself freestyling over a royalty-free piano beat he found on YouTube. He uploaded the track, called “Run Away,” to Soundcloud in December 2021 and tagged it with keywords that helped it go viral: #emo #chill #lowfi #slowedandreverb #blowthisup #foryoupage.But it wasn’t until July 2022, when he self-released the brooding ballad “Romantic Homicide,” that the then-17-year-old really blew up. Two months later, D4vd signed a deal with Interscope Records’ Darkroom imprint. The comparisons to Billie Eilish, who also scored a deal with Darkroom as a teenager after uploading tracks to Soundcloud, were immediate. In magazine profiles, D4vd was heralded as a new kind of wunderkind: a sheltered gamer who accidentally became a pop star, seemingly overnight. GQ dubbed him a “mouthpiece for Gen-Z heartache.” NME declared he was a “multi-genre visionary.” And Billboard christened D4vd “one of alternative music’s most promising new artists.”“When I found him, it was like, ‘Wow, he made this in his closet on headphones, on Bandlab. That’s so cool. I could do that, too,’” says Ykare, a popular TikTokker who used to dream about collaborating with D4vd. “That was his whole thing. That was his claim to fame. I think that’s really what brought in a lot of younger audiences.”Before Ykare found his niche—dressing as a Teletubby and singing in the shower—he was inspired by D4vd’s humble beginnings. “People looked up to him,” Ykare says, because of D4vd’s explosive breakout from a “homemade, ‘I made this in my bedroom’ niche. That’s where D4vd lived, and he kind of was the most successful to do that.”D4vd communicated with his super-young fans through his Discord. His server was created by a fan named Moji around the time he signed his record deal. Though not officially affiliated with Darkroom, the Discord had a clear benefit to the label: It was a way to promote releases, tour dates, and merchandise directly to superfans. Moderators, which were mostly other fans but also included at least one member of D4vd’s management team, Mogul Vision, and occasionally D4vd himself, shared links to new content and encouraged members to subscribe to D4vd’s email list for presale ticket codes. (Neither Mogul Vision, Darkroom, Interscope Geffen A&M Records, nor its parent company, Universal Music Group, responded to a request for comment.) The tactics also cemented D4vd’s perceived authenticity as a chronically online teenager without much media training.In February 2023, three months before he dropped his debut EP and kicked off his first European tour, D4vd popped into the Discord with an announcement: He’d “officially named the blindfold character” he’d portrayed in the video for “Romantic Homicide.” His name was Itami, the Japanese word for pain, D4vd explained, and he was only the first character of many to come in his own cinematic universe, which he called the “d4vdverse.” A few days later, he posted about Itami on X, telling fans to “feel free to leave conspiracy theories.” In the YouTube caption for a music video featuring the character, D4vd took the concept a step further, instructing his fans to look for Easter eggs.“He wears a blindfold for the sole purpose of not being held accountable for the pain he causes,” reads the caption. “He’s been planted in all of my music videos but it’s not clear what his motive is … You will soon find out.”D4vd performed his hit song “Romantic Homicide” on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2023.Photograph: Randy Holmes/Getty ImagesWhen Sarah, who is 30 and works in veterinary medicine in Oregon, first heard about the body uncovered from D4vd’s car, she had the same thought as Safiyya: D4vd must have been framed. Sarah had joined the musician’s Discord server after hearing “Romantic Homicide” on TikTok and loving its slow-building melody and evocative lyrics. But she’d always interpreted them as metaphorical: “Like, you’re dead emotionally to me, you know?”Then she came across a Reddit post and began to fear that D4vd’s lyrics were more literal. The post was written by a since-deleted user who worried, in the days before the human remains in D4vd’s Tesla had been identified, that they already knew who the victim was. “A close friends [sic] little sister from the [Inland Empire] ran away last year and this is who she was with,” the message, which has also since been deleted, reads in part. “I’m terrified that’s who is in the car- nobody has heard from her in months. I won’t release names as shes [sic] still a minor but she was from Lake Elsinore.”On September 18, when the Los Angeles Police Department publicly released the name of the victim, Sarah felt sick to her stomach. It was 14-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez. As the Reddit post had suggested, she was from Lake Elsinore, a working-class city about 75 miles southeast of Los Angeles. She had indeed been reported missing by her family. In photos of Rivas Hernandez splashed across the news, she had big brown eyes, a cleft chin, and middle-parted black ringlets that fell past her shoulders. She wore a gold cross around her neck and dressed like the middle schooler she was, in jeans, sneakers, and zip-up hoodies from the Gap.The dead body of Celeste Rivas Hernandez was found in the trunk of a Tesla owned by D4vd.Photograph: Getty ImagesFor Sarah, who says she was groomed as a teenager by an adult in a gaming chat room, it was not difficult to imagine that Rivas Hernandez may have met D4vd online, maybe even in a Discord server. Sarah remembers thinking: “I’ve been Celeste. I’ve been in her shoes.”It wasn’t the first time that Sarah—who enjoyed sleuthing and had grown up watching the 2010s reality show Catfish, about people using fake online identities—had empathized with a young, female murder victim. In the summer of 2021, she followed the online investigation into the disappearance of 22-year-old Gabby Petito. After weeks of searching, and a near-endless stream of viral YouTube and TikTok videos, Petito’s remains were found in a national forest in Wyoming. Soon after, her fiancé killed himself, leaving behind a notebook in which he confessed to her murder. Sarah was less than three years older than Petito at the time, and she’d also been in an abusive relationship. “I thought that I would end up like her,” Sarah says.Fueled by her anger about Rivas Hernandez’s murder and her own experiences with men, Sarah, like legions of others who once streamed “Romantic Homicide” on repeat, turned on D4vd. Sarah blocked his music on Spotify and joined newly created Discord servers with names like “The David Case” and “David Leaks,” where former fans were now scouring the artist’s digital footprint for traces of Rivas Hernandez. True-crime buffs, many of whom had never previously heard of D4vd but were now scandalized by his morbid lyrics, became engrossed with the murder mystery too.They swarmed r/d4vd, a subreddit where fans once posted interpretations of song lyrics and D4vd’s social media posts. Only now, the speculation was unified and turbo-charged by a shared theory: That D4vd groomed Rivas Hernandez online, engaged in a sexual relationship with her, and housed her when she ran away from home at just 13 years old.Rivas Hernandez was reported missing to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office at least twice in 2024: once, on Valentine’s Day, and again in April, following a brief return home. 911 call logs obtained by WIRED suggest Rivas Hernandez’s home life may have been tumultuous. Roughly three weeks after her second disappearance, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office received a call reporting a suspicious circumstance at her family’s home, which sits on the same block as a liquor store and an auto repair shop. On Christmas Eve, the sheriff’s office fielded a call reporting an alleged battery that had just occurred at her home; a report was not taken, and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office declined to offer specifics. A lawyer representing Rivas Hernandez’s parents did not respond to a request for comment.The mystery surrounding Rivas Hernandez’s death made news globally. “It really hits on a lot of issues, like the exploitation and abuse of minors in Hollywood specifically and the system and how it protects or fails to protect minors,” says Amanda, a 30-year-old speech-language pathologist who grew up close to D4vd’s Texas hometown and became intrigued by the case after hearing about it on TikTok. “She was a minor, she was vulnerable, a runaway in the streets of Hollywood, you know? Like, could you be more vulnerable?”In fast-growing subreddits like r/d4vd2, r/CelesteRivasHernandez, r/JusticeforCeleste, and r/d4vdiots, Rivas Hernandez became a martyr nearly overnight. There were illustrations of her as a saint and avatars of her face, taken from missing person’s flyers her family once posted on Facebook. Sleuths saw her everywhere: in screenshots of Instagram stories, where a dainty hand showed off what appeared to be an engagement ring and an index finger tattoo that read “Shhh” (D4vd, they alleged, has a matching one); on Twitch, where a sassy girl in a hoodie and oversized glasses appeared to taunt and embarrass D4vd during a livestream, even accusing him of “raping kids”; and in D4vd’s own music videos, which frequently featured actors who shared a resemblance to Rivas Hernandez, with olive skin and curly dark hair.When sleuths noticed that Aysia Collins, a 23-year-old model and actor who played D4vd’s love interest in the video for “Sleep Well,” had also appeared in his Instagram photos and Twitch streams, they flooded her social media pages with accusations relating to Rivas Hernandez. Anyone and everyone who had been photographed regularly alongside D4vd, including the video game streamer Neo Langston—better known by his handle, NeoTheAsian—became fair game to online interrogators.On Reddit and TikTok, nearly every aspect of the case was debated endlessly, including the length of time Rivas Hernandez’s remains had been in the Tesla and the exact date she died. There were even more grisly questions: Had her body been dismembered or merely decomposed? (It would be another several months until the LA County District Attorney confirmed both were true.) Meanwhile, conspiracies proliferated about D4vd having hired doppelgängers as a way to hide his alleged relationship with an underage runaway.These theories may have seemed outlandish if D4vd hadn’t explicitly trained his fans, through his introduction of Itami and the so-called d4vdverse, to analyze his music for hidden meanings. Symbolism, fantasy, and mythology—much of it inspired by Japanese anime and world-building video games like Fortnite—were so central to D4vd’s brand that one of his moderators even created a channel in his Discord server to encourage conjecture. The channel was described as a place “to discuss yo

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