This blog is about seven dangerous hackers that I have been reading and researching about, this is not any kind of poll or competitive analysis. It's just about how these seven people who performed malicious task and how did it impact the world.
1.
Gary McKinnon is a Scottish systems administrator who was accused in 2002 of perpetrating the "biggest military computer hack of all time," although McKinnon himself states 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 was accused of hacking into ninety-seven United States military and NASA computers over a thirteen-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, at the house of his girlfriend's aunt in London, using the name 'Solo'. He was accused of deleting critical files from operating systems, which shut down the United States Army's Military District of Washington network of two thousand computers for twenty-four hours. McKinnon also posted a message on the military's website: "Your security is crap". After the September 11 attacks in 2001, he deleted weapons logs at the Earle Naval Weapons Station, rendering its network of three hundred computers inoperable and paralyzing munitions supply deliveries for the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet. McKinnon was also accused of copying data, account files and passwords onto his own computer. US authorities stated that the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was over seven hundred thousand dollars.
2.
Kevin David Mitnick is an American computer security consultant, author, and convicted hacker. He is now a respectable businessman specializing, as so many former hackers do, in improving the security of their clients’ firms. But this reform has come at the end of a 5-year prison sentence, itself stemming from the violation of a previous sentence (Mitnick committed a hack at the end of his supervised release period). He was arrested in 1995 after breaking into the Department of Justice computers and was said to be able to launch nuclear missiles by whittling down a payphone. The claims may have been exaggerated, but it’s easy to see why he was considered the most dangerous man in the world back in the 1990s.
3.
Cody Kretsinger- Affiliated with the hacker group LulzSec is known to his fellow hackers as “Recursion”. He was convicted in 2013 for his part in a 2011 hack on Sony Playstation, where he managed to get 77 million people’s personal data and cause an outage on the network for 24 days. LulzSec has often been accused of being childish and operating with no real motivation other than, as their name suggests, “the lulz”. They don’t often hack for financial gain – none of the 77 million had their identity stolen – and try to prove just how easy it is to get this kind of data. Kretsinger was granted another relatively light sentence, with only a year in prison for his crimes and many of LulzSec are still at large and operating.
4.
Robert Tappan Morris, creator of the “Morris Worm” – a virus that is said to have infected around 6,000 computers. He released it while studying at Cornell in 1988 and was apparently attempting to determine the size of the internet. An innocent enough aim, but he had made his worm death-proof and so it kept replicating itself into unwanted places. He was indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and was the first person to do so. As with many of these hackers, his sentence was relatively light – probation, community service and a fine – and he went on to found several companies in the computing sphere.
5.
Adrián Alfonso Lamo Atwood was an American threat analyst and hacker. Lamo first gained media attention for breaking into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, culminating in his 2003 arrest.[6] Lamo was best known for reporting U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning to Army criminal investigators in 2010 for leaking hundreds of thousands of sensitive U.S. government documents to
WikiLeaks. Lamo died on March 14, 2018, at the age of 37.
6.
Jonathan Joseph James was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. He was the poster boy for teenage hackers, gaining his first conviction at the age of 16 for stealing $170m worth of code from NASA. He did this by hacking into the computers of the Defence Threat Reduction Agency and installing a “backdoor” which gave him access to both messages and source code. He was 15 at the time of the offense and 16 when tried, so he received only a juvenile sentence. He resolved to put this past behind him but in 2007 his name was mentioned in conjunction with a hack on the TJX department store. Maintaining his innocence but convinced he would go to prison, he committed suicide on May 18th, 2008.
7.
Jeremy Hammond is an American activist and computer hacker from Chicago. He founded the computer security training website HackThisSite in 2003. Currently serving a 10-year prison sentence, Jeremy Hammond is the hacker who stole 60,000 credit card numbers and used them to make donations to charity. So quite a nice hacker then? He certainly seems to be broadly on the side of good, attacking neo-nazis and holocaust deniers, but there’s no denying he’s on the wrong side of the law at the same time. One of his biggest achievements was hacking the e-mails of the Stratfor group, who specialize in global intelligence and publishing 973 of them on the WikiLeaks website. Among the revelations contained in the e-mails were details of Osama bin Laden’s death and plans to incite a revolution in Venezuela. It was shocking stuff, but it was the credit card theft that saw him sent to jail, some say unfairly.
Please comment below if you agree or disagree with my list.
Comments
Post a Comment