Lets have a look at the great hackers of the world till date who have shook the world and big IT players in Market too. Before telling you what all they did, i would like to tell you that all of them have been imprisoned because of the losses the Countries and the big companies suffered because of them. They could have used their intelligence in a better way and could have improved the society.
#10 Michael Calce:
When he first started hacking he was
famously referred as mafia boy, and his name was prevented from getting public,
for he was a minor, when fads nabbed him. A high school student from west
island, Quebec who launched service attacks in the year 2000 against the top
commercial websites including Yahoo!, amazon.com, Dell, E-trade, E-Bay and CNN.
Like many hackers, Calce exploited websites primarily for pride and
establishing dominance for himself and his cyber group.
#9 The Deceptive Duo:
In the year 2002 two young computer
prodigies namely Benjamin stark,20 and Robert Lyttle,18 broke into government
networks, including the U.S. navy, NASA, FAA and Department of Defense (DoD).
They argued that they were merely trying to expose security failures and
protect Americans because of the 9/11 incident.
#8 Raphael Gray:
Raphael was 19 years old when he
hacked the computer systems around the world in over six weeks, and made
mockery of the security the world felt safe in. His mission was to make a
multi- million pound credit card. He published about 6,500 credit cards as an
example of weak security in the consumer websites.
#7 Vladimir Levin:
Vladimir Levin became famous for
being involved in an attempt to fraudulent transfer of $10.7 million through
Citibank’s computers. He and his 4 other members with him were involved in this
activity. He was said to have coordinated the first ever internet bank raid.
Levin used a laptop computer in
London, England for the access. He stole the customer’s codes and passwords. He
made a transaction of $3.7 million via wires to accounts his group controlled
in United States, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.
#6 Adrian Lamo:
Adrian Lamo was famous by his nickname
“the homeless hacker”. He used coffee shops, libraries and internet cafés as
his locations for hacking. Lamo is widely-known for breaking into a series of
high-profile computer networks--The New York Times, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and MCI
WorldCom. In 2002, he added his name to the The New York Times’ internal
database of expert sources and utilized LexisNexis account to conduct research
on high-profile subjects.
#5 Jonathan James:
Jonathan James, aged only 16, was the
first teenager to be held captive for computer hacking when he was only sixteen
years old. He broke into the server of department of defense in the year 1999
which gave him a nick name comrade at the age of 16. He also broke into NASA.
Stealing softwares of NASA and DoD later put him into big trouble.
#4 Kevin Poulsen:
Also known as Dark Dante, Poulsen
gained recognition for his hack of LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines, (taing over
all of the station’s phone lines) which earned him a brand new Porsche, among
other items. His photo came up on the show Unsolved Mysteries, 1-800 phone
lines for the program crashed. Law enforcement dubbed him “the Hannibal Lecter
of computer crime.”
#3 Kevin David Mitnick:
Kevin started with his minor cyber-crimes
when he was twelve years old. He hacked the Los Angeles bus transfer system to
get free rides the biggest hacking was the breaking into the DEC system to view
the VMS source code (open virtual memory system which lead to the clean-up cost
of around $160,000. He broke into the computer of top technology and telecommunications
like Nokia, Motorola, Fujitsu Siemens and sun Microsystems. He termed his
activity as social engineering to legalize his acts.
#2 Robert Tappan Morris:
On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris
released a worm that took down one-tenth of the Internet, crippling 6,000 plus
computer systems. At that time he was a student at Cornell and from that where
he started writing codes to create worms as he wanted to know how large the
internet world is. But the worm lead to the slow speed of internet and made the
systems no longer usable.
#1 Gary McKinnon:
Gary McKinnon comes first among his
peer hackers. His hacking into top notch U.S. institutions was talk of legends.
U.S. military, Pentagon, NASA succumbed to his hacking and reduced to sort of
mockery. In 2002, an exceptionally odd message appeared on a US Army computer
screen: “Your security system is crap,” it read. “I am Solo. I will continue to
disrupt at the highest levels.” It was later identified as the work of Scottish
systems administrator, Gary McKinnon. This made him the biggest hacker
celebrity the world have ever seen and registered his name in golden words in
book of hackers.
