In recent years, the concept of “hacking” and its culture have gained great popularity: from how the topic is addressed in the films “The Matrix”, “Mission Impossible”, “On the Hook” to real “hacktivists”, hacker associations (the most famous of them - Anonymous), related news reports, widespread scandals and litigation.
However, few people know that hackers have their own levels, and that each of them is “wearing a hat”. So, not all hackers are bad. Information security specialists, those who help identify and eliminate IT system vulnerabilities, are called “white hat hackers”. White hat hackers) Others, who simply want to have fun and do no significant harm, wear “gray hats” (Eng. Gray hat hackers) In our article, we will mainly touch upon the most dangerous and well-known type - in black hats. Black hat hackers), - cybercriminals. It is these people who take illegal actions: they conduct attacks on the servers of large companies, gain access to classified state or personal information, and are also responsible for its disclosure.
10. Michael Kals
Michael Kals, better known by the pseudonym Mafiaboy, was born in 1982, in the province of Quebec, the city of Montreal in Canada. As early as 9 years old, he himself could conduct the American email service AOL, removing the trial restriction of “30-day use”. February 7, 2000, arguing with another hacker, 15-year-old Michael carried out a DOS attack on eBay, CNN, Buy.com, and Yahoo’s most popular search service in those days.
DOS - attack - Denial of service (eng. Denial of Service). The essence of this method is to create “harmful” traffic, which exhausts the processing power of servers. As a result, for ordinary users, the use of the resource is difficult or the service cannot cope, and access to it is limited in general.
Codenamed “Rat,” (Italian: Rivolta), Kals arranged an operation to seize university computers from which the attacks were conducted. As a result, the hacker achieved his goal and brought the system to failure, so Yahoo search was unavailable for an entire hour, and it was almost impossible to work on other attacked services. By this method, Michael Kals received his recognition in hacker circles, and with this publicity.
In September 2001, he pleaded guilty in court to at least 56 other attacks. Michael was sent to a correctional boarding school for 8 months with the obligation to pay a small fine.
At the moment, Michael Kals is known as a “white hat” hacker and helps corporations defend themselves against intruders.
9. Owen Thor Walker
In November 2007, the search for New Zealand’s most famous cybercriminal Owen Thor Walker, better known as AKILL, ended. Today, he is 29 years old, he has acknowledged his participation in 6 large-scale cyber attacks around the world.
Walker lived with his parents in the city of Hamilton upstate New Zealand. From childhood, the boy suffered from Asperger Syndrome, a type of childhood autism. The disease is characterized by a mental retardation associated with socialization with other people.
From the age of 13, under the pseudonym AKILL, he wrote harmless programs for his entertainment. Owen no one taught computer skills, he learned everything himself through the Internet.
At 17, his criminal activity began. Owen Thor Walker - creator of the Akbot virus, which infected 13 million computers. A specially thought-out program code allowed it to go unnoticed by antiviruses, while it collected personal user data: logins, passwords, and most importantly: credit card numbers and codes.
In 2008, Walker announced that he was the leader of a hacker organization that caused damage in the amount of 32 thousand dollars. The remaining 13 members of the groups are still on the wanted list.
Owen Thor Walker was fined $ 11,000 with a further commitment to work for the state and help the country's security forces.
8. Vladimir Levin
Vladimir Leonidovich Levin is one of the most famous hackers in Russia. He was educated at the chemistry department at the St. Petersburg State Technological Institute.
Levin was fond of computers on his own, not receiving any further education anywhere.
While in London, using his laptop, he managed to penetrate Citibank's user database, gaining access to their personal information and passwords. Over the week, he was able to transfer to controlled accounts in Europe more than $ 3.7 million. Citibank's administrator managed to notice and suspend yet another major transfer of $ 10 million in time.
When bank employees discovered criminal operations, they contacted the authorities who were able to track and arrest Levin in March 1995. Citibank managed to return all the money stolen from the accounts with the exception of 400 thousand dollars, which were never found. In the United States, a court sentenced him to 3 years in prison and paid $ 240,000.
Interesting fact: In Russia, Levin studied only French. Therefore, at the beginning of the criminal activity he had a hard time - most computer terminology is described in English.
7. Jonathan James Ancheta
The story of Jonathan James, known online as c0mrade, is one of the most tragic. He started hacking as a teenager, he hacked and gained access to major US commercial and state networks, he was convicted and imprisoned - and all this until adulthood.
At the age of 6, little Jonathan began to study computer technology. Already at 16, Jonathan entered the structure of the Agency for the reduction of the military threat of the United States Department of Defense. In 1999, he established a loophole, due to which displayed thousands of internal messages of employees, as well as their logins, passwords and personal information.
Loophole, backdoor (English Backdoor) is a deliberate defect in the code that is prescribed by the developer in order to remotely gain unauthorized access to a computer or computer network.
At the same time Jonathan Hacked NASA Networks and downloaded a significant portion of the source code, which was responsible for managing the International Space Station. Finding a gap, NASA had to stop working for three weeks to clarify the circumstances and correct the consequences.
Soon, public services followed him. He pleaded guilty to hacking, and had to make an official apology to the US Department of Defense and NASA, as well as spend seven months under house arrest.
In 2007, a large number of companies were susceptible to hacker attacks. Jonathan was under suspicion of investigation, despite the fact that he denied any involvement in the case. In 2008, Jonathan James Ancheta committed suicide, believing that they want to accuse him of crimes that he did not commit.
6. Robert Tappan Morris
Robert Tappan Morris got his first computer skills from his father, who at that time worked for Bell Labs, and a little later for the US National Security Agency.
Morris - known in the world as the creator of the world's first computer worm.
A computer worm is a type of malicious computer program that can spread by itself, infecting computer networks.
As a student at Cornell University, he created a program called the Morris Worm. The program was not created with malicious intent - according to Robert's plan, it was only to calculate the total number of computers on the network. But there was a fatal error in the code - the infected computer was read one more time and again indefinitely, which at first slowed down the work, consuming an increasing amount of resources, and then completely disabling the device.
Robert Tappan Morris was convicted under the American Computer Fraud and Damage Act. Computer fraud and abuse act) in 1989. The court ruled three years of probation, 400 hours of correctional labor and damages in the amount of 10,050 dollars.
5. Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman is a well-known activist of the American Free Computer Software Movement.
In 1971, at the end of his first year at Harvard University, he became a programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of Artificial Intelligence, as well as a member of a hacker group in which he uses only his RMS initials.
His hacking activity at that moment was in testing developed software and searching for vulnerabilities and gaps in it. At the same time, Stallman is opposed to the commercial use of closed source programs.
Although now it’s quite difficult to say which hat or “level” suits him, only one thing is known for certain - his ideas inspired an entire movement of activists, supporters of free software and influenced the formation of a future hacker culture.
4. Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo was born in 1981 in Massachusetts, USA. He became interested in computers at an early age and, according to his mother, "was gifted with an inquiring mind and curiosity."
Lamo is often called a "homeless hacker." Always on the go, on the road, he could easily find himself spending the night with friends, on the street, and sometimes in abandoned buildings. So, at first he was known as a “white hat hacker”: revealing to companies easy targets and shortcomings in program code, and their computer network. Lamo easily found “holes” and other vulnerabilities, but did not always help fix them, even if a fee was offered.
In February 2002 hacker managed to break into N.Y. Times receiving personal information from absolutely all employees of the organization. Already in 2003, he was arrested for this hacking, and a year later he was assigned 6 months in prison and a fine of $ 65 thousand for attacks on Lexis Nexus and Microsoft.
In 2010, Adrian Lamo - recognized as a persona non grata in the hacker community. His actions helped expose Chelsea Manning, who transferred most of the secret documents to WikiLeaks.
After these events, Lamo begin to pursue paranoia. Often he is seen in dens, in psychiatric hospitals. In March 2018, Adrian Lamo was found dead - the cause of death remains unknown.
3. Kevin Poulsen
What people will not do to win a car or a house of their dreams. Even if it's just an online contest or a raffle on the radio. But in this matter, it all depended not on simple luck. Kevin Poulsen known as “Dark Dante” has earned fame for knowing how telecom systems work.
So he was able to “hack” the line of the radio station and nominate himself as the winner of the Porsche car. Later, journalists will call him "Hannibal Lecter of Computer Crimes."
Poulsen was put on the wanted list by the FBI after he took control of the state-owned communications channel and illegally tapped internal conversations. Of all the possible places, he was arrested in one of the supermarkets. The court sentenced him to 4 years in prison and reimbursement in the amount of 56 thousand dollars.
After leaving prison in 1995, Kevin Poulsen changed his mind on many things. He becomes a journalist, and in 2006 even helps police identify rapists on MySpace.
2. Albert Gonzalez
For a reason, online banking services have multi-level identification as a means of protection to the user. That's because history already knows a lot of major crimes of stealing money from user accounts.
Whole two years Albert Gonzalez deducted customer credit card money. Having started his career as a leader of the hacker organization ShadowCrew, Gonzalez is responsible not only for illegally obtaining personal data, bank card information, but also for forging documents: passports, insurance and birth certificates. During this time, they managed to collect numbers and passwords of more than 170 million credit cards of various banks and payment systems like Heartland, TJX.
Currently, Albert Gonzalez is in custody: the court sentenced him to 20 years in prison for a total of two sane articles.
1. Kevin Mitnik
And now, first place: The US Department of Justice has recognized Kevin Mitnick as “the most dangerous wanted cybercriminal”. But when you look at it, not everyone can believe this statement. A 40-year-old man with glasses and a suit from Armani does not fit into the idea of “hackers” at all.
In the present, a successful entrepreneur, in the past a hacker who hacked Nokia, Motorola and even ... the Pentagon. After a year in custody over the hacking of the American computer company Digital Equipment Corporation, he was released and soon set up a real "hacker rampant", which included the famous penetration of the national security warning system and obtaining classified information.
One of the most popular questions in crosswords and crosswords: "Kevin Mitnik was the most famous of these crackers, 5 letters." The correct answer, of course, is “Hacker.”
He pleaded guilty to seven cases of network fraud, hacking, and tampering with private networks and state networks. After five years of second detention, which included eight months of solitary confinement, Kevin Mitnik begins a new life. At the moment, Kevin is a public figure, businessman, consultant in the field of information security.
The story of Kevin Mitnik is truly filled with the craziest events that even got their coverage in the cinema - the film “Hacking”.