DailyDDoSe: The 10 most notorious hackers

Friday, January 18, 2013

The 10 most notorious hackers

by Drew Hendricks, m.techi.com

While high-profile hacking made headlines in 2012, some of the most famous hack jobs took place years ago. The masterminds behind these notorious events are outlined below.

Kevin Mitnick
Labeled as the most wanted cyber criminal in United States history, Mitnick took down the dedicated servers of Motorola, Fujitsu and Nokia. After his 1995 arrest and five-year prison term, he went on to found a computer security firm.

Kevin Poulson
Using the name “Dark Dante”, Poulson gained notoriety by hacking into telephone systems, notably that of Los Angeles radio station KIIS, in order to win a contest. He also broke into police databases and was featured on the show “Unsolved Mysteries”. Poulson is now a journalist.

Adrain Lamo
Lamo is noted for his use of public Internet networks, such as in libraries and coffee shops, to infiltrate company computer networks. His biggest coups was breaching the NY Times database and abusing the paper’s Lexis-Nexis account to obtain confidential information. Lamo also became a journalist.

Stephen Wozniak
Best known as an Apple Computer founder, Wozniak began his career as a white-hat hacker. While still in university, he created a “blue box” that allowed people to call long distance for free. Wozniak eventually dropped out to join forces with Steve Jobs.

Loyd Blankenship
Known as one of the hacker elite, Blankenship was arrested in 1986 for activities connected with the Legion of Doom group. He penned the “Hacker Manifesto”, which is still a foundation of hacker philosophy today and was used in the 1995 film “Hackers”.

Michael Calce
At age 15, Calce brought down Yahoo, Amazon and eBay with intense denial of service attacks. Police arrested him after he bragged about the attack in chat rooms. He received a short jail term, probation and a fine.

Robert Tappan Morris
In 1988, Morris infected thousands of Unix computers with a virus, later dubbed the Morris Worm. He claimed he was simply trying to measure the size of the Internet, but received probation and a large fine.

Masters Of Deception
An elite hacking group, the MOD broke into phone systems. The group was brought down after its 1992 attack on AT&T, with most members not even going to jail.

David L. Smith
Smith is known for writing the infamous Melissa virus that was distributed via Usenet, causing millions of dollars worth of damage. He was sentenced to jail for the offense.

Sven Jaschan
Jaschan was the author of the Sasser and Netsky worms, which were virulent on the Internet in 2004. He was given a suspended sentence and later hired by a security firm.