Monday, May 19, 2008

Great Hackers

The 414s
The 414s were a gang of six teenagers named after their Milwaukee, Wisconsin area code, who broke into dozens of computer systems throughout the United States and Canada in 1983.Their exploits included Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Security Pacific Bank.The incident appeared as the cover storyof Newsweek with the title Beware: Hackers at play,possibly the first mass-media use of the term hacker in the context of computersecurity. As a result, the U.S. House of Representatives held hearings on computer security and passed several laws.

Mark Abene
Mark Abene (also known as Phiber Optik) inspired thousands of teenagers around the country to "study" the internal workings of the United States phone system. One of the founders of the Masters of Deception group.

Dark Avenger

Dark Avenger is the pseudonym of a Bulgarian virus writer who invented polymorphic code in 1992 as a means to circumvent the type of pattern recognition used by Anti-virus software, and nowadays also intrusion detection systems.

John Draper

John Draper(also known as Captain Crunch) is widely credited with evangelizing the use of the 2600 hertz tone generated by whistles distributed in Captain Crunch cereal boxes in the 1970s, and sometimes inaccurately credited with discovering their use.Draper served time in prison for his work, and is believed to have introduced Steve Wozniak to phone phreaking through the 2600Hz tone. Draper now develops anti-spam and security software.

Farid Essebar
Farid Essebar (also known as Diabl0) is the creator of Zotob

Nahshon Even-Chaim

Nahshon Even-Chaim (also known as Phoenix) was a leading member of Australianhacking group The Realm. He targeted US defense and nuclear research computer systemsin late 1980s until his capture by Australian Federal Police in 1990. He and fellow Realm members Electron and Nom were the world's first computer intruders prosecuted based on evidence gathered from remote computer intercept.

Markus Hess

Markus Hess is a West German who hacked into United States Military sites and collected information for the KGB,he was eventually tracked down by Clifford Stoll.

Jonathan James
(convicted cybercriminal)
Jonathan James(also known as c0mrade) downloaded $1.7 million dollars worth of softwarewhich controlled the International Space Station's life sustaining elements, and intercepted thousands of electronic messages relating to U.S. nuclear activities from the Department of Defense. Sentenced at age 16, he was the youngest person ever incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States.

ne0h
ne0h was reported to have been employed by a Pakistani terrorist with Al-Qaeda connections, in order to steal student information from a Chinese university(reportedly, one comparable to MIT[citation needed]), India's BhabhaAtomic Research Centre, and SIPRNet, the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Data Network.

Adrian Lamo

Lamo surrendered to federal authorities in 2003 after a brief manhunt, and was charged with nontechnical but surprisingly successful intrusions into computer systems at Microsoft, The New York Times, Lexis-Nexis, MCI WorldCom, SBC, Yahoo!, and others. His methods were controversial, and his full-disclosure-by-media practices led some to assert that he was publicity-motivated.

Vladimir Levin

Vladimir Levin allegedly masterminded the Russian hacker gang that tricked Citibank's computers into spitting out $10 million. To this day, the method used, or even if Vladimirwas a mathematician, is unknown.

Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick was held in jail for four and a half years and released on January 21,2000. He was convicted of computer related crimes and possession of several forged identification documents. Once "the most wanted man in cyberspace", Mitnick went on to be a prolific public speaker, author, and media personality.

Robert Tappan Morris

Robert T. Morris, while a graduate student at Cornell University in 1988, created the first worm, Morris Worm, which used buffer overflows to propagate. He is the son of Robert Morris, the former chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA). Morris was not exactly a hacker of the computer security hacker culture, but a user of the MIT-AI, the home machine of the early academic hacker culture. According to Steven Levy, he was a true hacker who blundered.

v00d00
Jason Burks born October 2 1976, also referred to as "v00d00" is a former computer hacker, and malicious software writer. He is best known for writing the Juggernaut Hydra, and releasing it into the Progressive Insurance mainframe.

Craig Neidorf

In 1990, Neidorf (a co-founder of Phrack) was prosecuted for stealing the E911 documentfrom BellSouth and publicly distributing it online. BellSouth claimed that the document was worth $80,000; they dropped the charges after it was revealed that copies of the document could simply be ordered for a minuscule $13.

Brian Salcedo

Brian Salcedo was convicted in 2004 of conspiracy to commit wire and computer fraud for hacking the Lowe's home improvement chain's unsecured wireless LAN in an attempt to capture credit card numbers used during transactions. The FBI claimed that the crime could have caused more than $2.5 million in damages. He was sentenced to 9 years in federal prison. The government claims that at the time of its imposition, Brian Salcedo'ssentence was the longest federal prison sentence ever given for a computer related offense.

David L. Smith

In 1999, Smith launched the Melissa Worm, causing $80 million dollars worth of damageto businesses. Originally sentenced to 40 years, he eventually served only 20 monthswhen he agreed to work undercover for the FBI.

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