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These are nine out of the top ten criminally charged hackers.
The Cyber Crime Hall of Fame
John Draper
Possibly best known by the moniker Cap'n Crunch (yes, like the cereal), John Draper is one of the first people to which the term "hacker" can be applied. In the 1970s, Draper used a toy whistle found in Cap'n Crunch cereal to hack phone lines and make calls. Draper realized the whistle produced the exact tone necessary to signal that an active call on a phone line had ended—2600 Hz, to be precise—when in fact it had not, thus allowing the call to continue even after the exchange thought it had ended. Draper was found out in 1972 when the phone company flagged his strange billing patterns; he was eventually sentenced to two months in prison. "Phreaking," or the hacking of telecom systems, as it's now called, can be directly traced to Draper.
Ranks For: Ingenuity, Historical Significance
Kevin Mitnick
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.. --> end ziffimage //-->Though Kevin Mitnick landed on the hacking radar in 1981 (at age 17), he didn't hit the really big time until 1983. While a student at USC, Mitnick gained access to ARPANet, an Internet predecessor used by large corporations, universities, and the U.S. Army. Getting into ARPANet provided him with access to the Pentagon and all the Department of Defense's files, but he didn't actually steal any data. It's a glory thing. After the system administration got wise, Mitnick was arrested on the USC campus and served a short stint in a youth detention center—the first sentence for illegally accessing a computer system. The incident marked Mitnick's second arrest, but he would continue to be on the FBI radar and has since been the subject of many more arrests, investigations, and court cases.
Ranks For: Ingenuity, Scope
Robert Morris
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.. --> end ziffimage //-->Not every hacker reaches superstar status for wanton malicious tactics—sometimes things can just go awry. Such was the case in 1988 for 23-year-old Cornell graduate student Robert Morris, who released 99 lines of code that became known as the Morris Worm, infecting and crashing computers across the country. Morris has said that the original intention of the code was to gauge the size of the Internet by counting the number of machines currently connected to it. After his arrest in 1989, Morris became the first person to be indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and was subsequently sentenced to probation, community service, and a fine of about $10,000.
Kevin Poulsen
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.. --> end ziffimage //-->Twenty-four-year-old Kevin Poulsen had been in the FBI's sights for quite a while when he was arrested in 1989 for hacking computer and telephone servers. Before going to trial, though, Poulsen fled, leading the FBI on a 17-month chase, which ended shortly after his most infamous hack job. Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM held a call-in contest that would give a Porsche 944-S2 to the 102nd caller; taking control of the switchboard lines and blocking all incoming calls, Poulsen made sure he was the 102nd caller and claimed his prize. He was apprehended at a Los Angeles-area supermarket thanks to an anonymous tip in 1991.
Ranks For: Ingenuity
Vladimir Levin
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.. --> end ziffimage //-->It's a scheme we've seen so many times in the movies that we assume it's old hat in the hacking world, but the first time anyone succeeded in illegally transferring a large sum of money from a major bank was 1994. Gaining access to several major corporate account user names and passwords through CitiBank's analog wire transfer network, Vladimir Levin transferred a sum of $10.7 million to accounts in the U.S., Finland, the Netherlands, Israel, and Germany. Three of Levin's accomplices were apprehended when attempting to make withdrawals from accounts, but Levin himself was not detained until 1995 during a layover at London's Stansted Airport. He was eventually extradited to the United States in 1997, sentenced to three years in jail, and ordered to pay $240,015 in restitution to CitiBank. The bank has said they managed to recover all but $400,000 of the stolen funds.
Ranks For: Ingenuity, Historical Significance, Cost
David Smith
Everyone wants to be the first at something and claim their spot in history; though being the first hacker tried for releasing a virus isn't exactly the sort of "first" Mom's going to brag about. In 1999, David Smith released the Melissa worm from a computer in New Jersey through a stolen AOL account. The worm automatically forwarded itself to the first 50 people in a user's Outlook address book, and also was apt to insert a quote from The Simpsons into documents. All told, the worm hit over 300 companies worldwide, including Microsoft, Intel, and Lucent Technologies, forcing them to shut down their e-mail gateways due to mass overcrowding and causing estimated damages nearing $80 million. After pleading guilty, Smith's prison sentence was reduced to 20 months when he began working undercover for the FBI to help sniff out new viruses and their authors.
Jonathan James
In late June 1999, Jonathan James found out just how much the source code documents for the NASA's International Space Station are worth: $1.7 million. James, then 15, gained access to NASA computers with the help of a stolen password at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. As a result, NASA was forced to shut down its computer network for several weeks in July 1999. The code in question was responsible for controlling the environment on the Station, including temperature and humidity. Sixteen at the time of his sentencing, James received six months in prison and probation until he turned 18.
Ranks For: Scope, Cost
MafiaBoy
At the time of his hack, Mike Calce could only be referred to as MafiaBoy since Canadian laws prevented news outlets from releasing the name of the then teenage super hacker. In February 2000, Calce launched a denial-of-service attack that struck 11 major Web companies—including Amazon, eBay, E*TRADE, and Dell—via 75 computers on 52 networks. While there's no hard data to quantify how much monetary damage was done, analyst estimates range as high as $1.7 billion Canadian (that's currently about $1.6 billion U.S). When tried in 2001, Calce was handed a sentence of eight months "open custody," limited Internet use, a small fine, and one year of probation.
Ranks For: Scope, Cost
Gary McKinnon
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.. --> end ziffimage //-->Never underestimate the power of curiosity. In 2001 and 2002, British hacker Gary McKinnon gained access to Air Force, Army, Navy, NASA, Pentagon, and Department of Defense computers—97 in total—in a quest for evidence of flying saucers. Officials claim damages from his entry range close to $700,000. Though charged and convicted in the U.K., McKinnon is currently facing extradition to the U.S., which could mean up to 70 years in prison.
Ranks For: Scope
The 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes
The WANK Worm (October 1989)
Possibly the first "hacktivist" (hacking activist) attack, the WANK worm hit NASA offices in Greenbelt, Maryland. WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) ran a banner (pictured) across system computers as part of a protest to stop the launch of the plutonium-fueled, Jupiter-bound Galileo probe. Cleaning up after the crack has been said to have cost NASA up to a half of a million dollars in time and resources. To this day, no one is quite sure where the attack originated, though many fingers have pointed to Melbourne, Australia-based hackers.
Ministry of Defense Satellite Hacked (February 1999)
A small group of hackers traced to southern England gained control of a MoD Skynet military satellite and signaled a security intrusion characterized by officials as "information warfare," in which an enemy attacks by disrupting military communications. In the end, the hackers managed to reprogram the control system before being discovered. Though Scotland Yard's Computer Crimes Unit and the U.S. Air Force worked together to investigate the case, no arrests have been made.
CD Universe Credit Card Breach (January 2000)
A blackmail scheme gone wrong, the posting of over 300,000 credit card numbers by hacker Maxim on a Web site entitled "The Maxus Credit Card Pipeline" has remained unsolved since early 2000. Maxim stole the credit card information by breaching CDUniverse.com; he or she then demanded $100,000 from the Web site in exchange for destroying the data. While Maxim is believed to be from Eastern Europe, the case remains as of yet unsolved.
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Military Source Code Stolen (December 2000)
If there's one thing you don't want in the wrong hands, it's the source code that can control missile-guidance systems. In winter of 2000, a hacker broke into government-contracted Exigent Software Technology and nabbed two-thirds of the code for Exigent's OS/COMET software, which is responsible for both missile and satellite guidance, from the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. Officials were able to follow the trail of the intruder "Leaf" to the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, but that's where the trail appears to end.
Anti-DRM Hack (October 2001)
In our eyes, not all hackers are bad guys (as evidenced by our list of the .. --> start ziffarticle //-->Ten Greatest Hacks of All Time.. --> end ziffarticle //-->); often they're just trying to right a wrong or make life generally easier for the tech-consuming public. Such is the case of the hacker known as Beale Screamer, whose FreeMe program allowed Windows Media users to strip digital-rights-management security from music and video files. While Microsoft tried to hunt down Beale, other anti-DRM activists heralded him as a crusader.
Dennis Kucinich on CBSNews.com (October 2003)
As Representative Kucinich's presidential campaign struggled in the fall of 2003, a hacker did what he could to give it a boost. Early one Friday morning the CBSNews.com homepage was replaced by the campaign's logo. The page then automatically redirected to a 30-minute video called "This is the Moment," in which the candidate laid out his political philosophy. The Kucinich campaign denied any involvement with the hack, and whoever was responsible was not identified.
Hacking Your MBA App (March 2006)
Waiting on a college or graduate school decision is a nail-biting experience, so when one hacker found out how to break into the automated ApplyYourself application system in 2006, it was only natural that he wanted to share the wealth. Dozens of top business schools, including Harvard and Stanford, saw applicants exploiting the hack in order to track their application statuses. The still-unknown hacker posted the ApplyYourself login process on Business Week's online forums; the information was promptly removed and those who used it were warned by schools that they should expect rejection letters in the mail.
The 26,000 Site Hack Attack (Winter 2008)
MSNBC.com was among the largest of the thousands of sites used by a group of unknown hackers earlier this year to redirect traffic to their own JavaScript code hosted by servers known for malware. The malicious code was embedded in areas of the sites where users could not see it, but where hackers could activate it.
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Supermarket Security Breach (February 2008)
Overshadowed only by a T.J Maxx breach in 2005, the theft of at least 1,800 credit and debit card numbers (and the exposure of about 4.2 million others) at supermarket chains Hannaford and Sweetbay (both owned by the Belgium-based Delhaize Group) in the Northeast United States and Florida remains unsolved more than six months later. Chain reps and security experts are still unclear as to how the criminals gained access to the system; the 2005 T.J.Maxx breach took advantage of a vulnerability in the chain's wireless credit transfer system, but Hannaford and Sweetbay do not use wireless transfers of any sort. Without more information, the difficulty in tracking down those responsible grows exponentially.
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Comcast.net Gets a Redirect (May 2008)
A devious hack doesn't always mean finding a back door or particularly crafty way into a secure network or server; sometimes it just means that account information was compromised. Such was the case earlier this year when a member of the hacker group Kryogeniks gained unauthorized access to Comcast.net's registrar, Network Solutions. The domain name system (DNS) hack altered Comcast.net's homepage to redirect those attempting to access webmail to the hackers' own page (pictured). Spokespeople for Comcast and Network Solutions are still unclear as to how the hackers got the username and password.
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