The Top 10 Most Infamous Hackers of All Time
Who
among us has not been victimized by a virus? Not the virus that can
make a person sick, but the kind that can cripple your computer, or
worse, the entire network you are on. The culprits are those amazingly
talented people who possess the ability to come up with programs to
break into other people’s gadgets. Sometimes, they do it just for the
heck of it and annoy the hell out of us. Other times, they use it to
steal valuable information.
Regardless of their reasons, here is a list of the top 10 most infamous hackers of all time.
10. Loyd Blankenship
Loyd
Blankenship does not have a hack that can be solely attributed to him.
He was a member of the Legion of Doom, however, that rivaled the Masters
of Deception, or MoD, during the late 80′s. Known as The Mentor, his
claim to fame is authorship of
The Hacker Manifesto, which he wrote after his 1986 arrest. It defended hackers, claiming that they only do it to satisfy their curiosity.
9. Stephen Wozniak
The
co-founder of Apple started out as a hacker. While studying at the
University of California, Berkeley, he bypassed the phone system by
phreaking. This allowed him to make free long distance calls. He even
used it to call world leaders like the Pope. Not long after, he started
working with
Steve Jobs to create Apple Computer.
8. The Masters of Deception
During
the 1980′s, a group of hackers banded together to form the Legion of
Doom. It aimed to break in to the networks of giant corporations and
simply wreak havoc in it. Later on, some members of the group decided to
form and spin off a rival new group. They were all based in New York
and they called themselves the Masters of Deception, or MoD. The group’s
most famous victim was AT&T, whose system was broken through by
MoD, allowing them to hack to the company’s vast phone network. It was
only in 1992 that the group got busted, with its members going to jail
or receiving suspended sentences.
7. Adrian Lamo
Adrian
Lamo was a mobile hacker who launched his work from the confines of
Internet cafes, libraries or coffee shops. He actually did it just as a
challenge and for fun, as he would regularly break into computer systems
and then immediately tell the owner of the network about its
vulnerability. He even made himself an expert by adding his name to the
database of the New York Times. He was arrested in 2003. He was also the
one who turned in Bradley Manning, who had leaked government documents
to Wikileaks.
6. Sven Jaschan
In
2004, the wired world was bothered by a series of worms that eventually
became known as Netsky and Sasser. It spread so quickly that in just a
short while, the worms accounted for as much as 70 percent of all the
malware spreading at that time over the Internet. Amazingly, the
offender was only a mere teenager. His name was Sven Jaschan and he was
arrested and tried in court. Owing to the fact that he was still just a
teenager, he only got a suspended sentence, though the judge ordered him
to report to a probation officer regularly for the next three years.
Still, talent like that is hard to find, so despite his criminal
background, he was immediately hired by a security company to help come
up with antidotes to computer viruses.
5. David L. Smith
Back
in the nascent days of the Internet, usenet was all the rage. Just like
the beginning of time until now, sex was one of the more popular
topics. David L. Smith took advantage of this to spread the highly
notorious Melissa worm virus. The original form was distributed by
email, making it the first malware to be successfully transported
through this method. Experts estimate that the virus caused as much as
$80 million in damages. Smith was later arrested and sentenced to jail.
4. Michael Calce
He
was only 15 years old and was probably pining for a girlfriend like a
typical teenager, but Michael Calce was able to cause the temporary
shutdown of sites like Yahoo, Amazon and eBay. Using the name of
MafiaBoy, Calce hacked to the large commercial sites that led to
denial-of-service attacks across 75 computers in 52 networks. He might
have gotten away with it if he did not boast about his feat in an online
chat room. He was sentenced to eight months of open custody, a year of
probation and a small fine. He was also restricted from using the
Internet.
3. Robert Tappan Morris
In
1988, a graduate student from Cornell University who also had a
bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, decided to make use of his
Ivy League education to test the size of the Internet. He did it by
creating the Morris worm. The worm ended up affecting 6,000 major Unix
machines, practically shutting them down and causing millions of dollars
in damage. It was probably the first worm of its kind. Morris was
eventually caught, fined, sentenced to a three-year probation, and
ordered to conduct community service. The disk that he used to write the
worm is now on display at the Boston Museum of Science. Morris himself
is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
2. Kevin Poulsen
Kevin Poulsen started out with an amusing hack into the phone lines of a radio station that allowed him to be the 102
nd
caller, which made him win a Porsche. He also broke into the phone
system to reactivate old numbers. Poulsen was able to hack into the
federal investigation database. After he was featured on the TV show
Unsolved Mysteries,
the numbers posted for information leading to his arrest mysteriously
crashed. He has since been imprisoned and released. He is now a Senior
Editor for Wired News.
1. Kevin Mitnick
Kevin
Mitnick does not like being called a hacker. He instead claims to be a
social engineer, who has broken into the systems of Nokia, Fujitsu and
Motorola. He was arrested in 1995 and served five years in jail. He now
runs his own computer security consultancy company
