Tuesday 3 January 2012

Top 10 Notorious Hackers Of All Time


1. Eric Corley

December 16, 1959 born Eric Corley is frequently referred to by his pen name of Emmanuel Goldstein. He is a renowned figure in the hacker community. In the year 1999 he went to court for sharing DeCSS codes and a method to download it, a program that was able to decrypt content on an encrypted DVD. Eric owns a non-profit organization 2600 Enterprises, Inc. and publishes a magazine called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.
Corley lives in N.Y.C. and hosts a radio show called Off the Hook on WBAI as well as Brain Damage on Stony Brook University’s WUSB. His magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly provides information about phreaking and basic hacking.

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2. Robert Tappan Morris

Robert Tappan Morris born on November 8, 1965, is an American professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is best known for creating the Morris Worm that is considered to be the first computer worm on the Internet. He also co-founded the online store known by the name Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, with Paul Graham.

The worm he created is named after himself. According to Morris, the main purpose of his worm was to see how many computers were connected to the Internet. However, due to a configuration in the worm, it did a lot more damage than expected. It was estimated that the cost of “potential loss in productivity” caused by the worm at each system ranged from $20,000 to more than $530,000.


3. Mark Abene




Mark Abene, well known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker from New York City. Phiber Optik. He was a member of the hacker groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception. Phiber Optik was a high-profile hacker in the early 1990s. His appearance in The New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire in debates and on television made him known by people around the world.





4. Kevin Mitnick

Kevin David Mitnick (born on August 6, 1963) is a computer security consultant, author, and former computer hacker. The most-wanted computer criminal in the United States was arrested in 1995 for countless acts of computer fraud. He hacked into Digital Equipment Corporation systems, Nokia, Motorola, Fujitsu Siemens and man. 





5. Gary McKinnon

Scottish-born, London-based hacker McKinnon was born on 10 February 1966. He is the Scottish systems administrator and hacker who has been accused of what one US prosecutor claims is the biggest military computer hack of all time. To defend himself, McKinnon stated that he was merely looking for evidence of free energy suppression and a cover-up of UFO activity and other technologies potentially useful to the public.
McKinnon is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, using the name ‘Solo’. He is accused of hacking networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, 
Department of Defense and the US Air Force.



6. Raphael GrayH

e was just 19 when he hacked computer systems around the world over six weeks between January and February 1999 as part of a multi-million pound credit card mission, thereafter publishing credit card details of over 6,500 cards as an example of weak security in the growing number of consumer websites.

Gray broke into the secure systems using an £800 computer he bought in his home town Clynderwen, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Gray was dubbed the Bill Gates hacker when he sent Viagra tablets to Gates’ address and then published what he said was the billionaire’s own number. He was arrested by FBI agents and officers from the local Dyfed Powys Police at his home in March 1999.



7. Kevin Poulsen

Kevin Poulsen, born 1965 in Pasadena, California, U.S. is a a former black hat hacker best known for his takeover of the KIIS-FM phone lines, a Los Angeles based radio station. Before segueing into journalism, he had a controversial career in the 1980s as a hacker whose handle was Dark Dante. He is currently a senior editor at Wired News.


8. Jonathan James

Jonathan Joseph James born on December 12, 1983 was well known by the name c0mrade. He was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. He was mere 15 when he hacked committed a series of intrusions into various systems including those of BellSouth and the Miami-Dade school system.
His intrusion into the computers of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division of the United States Department of Defense came into light and he admitted that he had installed an unauthorized backdoor in a computer server in Dulles, Virginia, which he used to install a sniffer that allowed him to intercept over three thousand messages passing to and from DTRA employees, along with numerous usernames and passwords of other DTRA employees, including at least 10 on official military computers. The intrusion caused NASA to shut down its computers for three weeks that July, costing $41,000 to check and fix its systems. James died on May 18, 2008 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.








9. The Deceptive Duo

The Deceptive Duo-20-year-old Benjamin Stark and 18-year-old Robert Lyttle in the year 2002 created a series of high-profile break-ins to government networks, including the U.S. Navy, NASA, FAA andDepartment of Defense . When their hacking issue came into light, the duo claimed they were merely trying to expose security failures and protect Americans in a post-911 world.
Stark was sentenced to two years probation, Lyttle served four months in prison with three years’ probation, and both were ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in restitution for the damage they caused.




10. Adrian Lamo
Known as a grey hat hacker, Adrian Lamo is the hacker that found himself in trouble after the F.B.I was able to probe his illegal actions. Lamo is well known for exploitingcompanies such as Microsoft, the New York Times, Lexis-Nexis, and Yahoo! After the New York Times filed complaints Lamo was investigated by the F.B.I and after realizing that he was being tracked, he surrendered to the U.S. Marshals on September 9, 2003. He was ordered to pay $65,000 and was sentenced to home detention and probation.



The numbering in the list above is not based on the ascending/descending order in which these renowned hackers have left people amazed with their hacking; each one of them has made a distinctive mark.No matter how punishable act these well-known hackers have done but the fact remains they have great talent. Hats off to their daring shots!

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