Hacking is an attempt to
exploit a computer system or a private network inside a computer. Simply
put, it is the unauthorized access to or control over computer network
security systems for some illicit purpose.
Top 10 Hacker in the World
Kevin Mitnick
Robert Tappan Morris
Vladimir Levin
Michael Calce
Kevin Poulsen
Anonymous
Adrian Lamo
Jonathan James
George Hotz
Gary McKinnon
1. Kevin Mitnick
Kevin David Mitnick is an American computer security consultant,
author, and convicted hacker. He is best known for his high-profile 1995
arrest and five years in prison for various computer and
communications-related crimes.
Kevin Mitnick, once considered the most-wanted cyber criminal in the
United States, is often touted as the poster child of computer hacking.
Kevin mastered an early form of social engineering (scamming operators)
and computer hacking to gain access to and modify telephony switching
systems. After a very public two-year chase, arrest ,and incarceration,
the hacker community collectively rose in protest against what they
viewed as a witch hunt.
Born : 6 August 1963 ( Van Nuys, Los Angeles California, US )
Education : Pierce Collage, James Monroe High School, University of Southern California
2. Robert Tappan Morris
Robert Tappan Morris is an American computer scientist and
entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988,
considered the first computer worm on the Internet.
Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first
person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris released a worm that brought down
one-tenth of the Internet. With the need for social acceptance that
seems to infect many young hackers, Morris made the mistake of chatting
about his worm for months before he actually released it on the
Internet, so it didn't take long for the police to track him down.
Morris said it was just a stunt and added that he truly regretted
wreaking $15 million worth of damage, the estimated amount of carnage
caused by his worm.
Born : 8 November 1965 ( Massachusetts, United States )
Education : Harvard University (1999), Harvard University (1987)
Awards : ACM Fellow
Known for : The Morris Worm, Viaweb, YCombinator
Parents : Robert Morris, Anne Farlow Morris
Notable Student : Eddie Kohler
3. Vladimir Levin
Vladimir Leonidovitch Levin is a Russian individual famed for his
involvement in the attempt to fraudulently transfer USD 10.7 million via
Citibank's computers.
Seeming like the opening of a James Bond movie, Vladimir Levin was
working on his laptop in 1994 from his St. Petersburg, Russia,
apartment. He transferred $10 million from Citibank clients to his own
accounts around the world. As with most Bond movies, Levin's career as a
hacker was short lived -- with a capture, imprisonment, and recovery of
all but $400,000 of the original $10 million.
Michael Calce is a security expert and former computer hacker from
Île Bizard, Quebec who launched a series of highly publicized
denial-of-service attacks in February 2000 against large commercial
websites, including Yahoo!, Fifa.com, Amazon.com, Dell, Inc., E*TRADE,
eBay, and CNN.
Michael Calce, also known as MafiaBoy, was arrested in February 2000 for
launching a denial-of-service attack that brought down many of the
Internet's largest sites, including Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo. Calce's
lawyer, Yan Romanowski, claimed, "If [MafiaBoy] had used all his powers,
he could have done unimaginable damage." It is widely believed that
Calce is no more than a script kiddie. His attacks, however successful,
were implemented using computer scripts that clogged networks full of
garbage data.
Born : 1984 (age 36 years), Montreal, Canada
5. Kevin Poulsen
Kevin Lee Poulsen is an American former black-hat hacker and a contributing editor at The Daily Beast.
Kevin Poulsen, known as Dark Dante in the hacker community, specialized
in hacking phone systems, particularly radio stations. This talent
allowed only calls originating from his house to make it through to the
station, assuring him of wins in listener radio contests. His iconic
1991 hack was a takeover of all of the telephone lines for the Los
Angeles KIIS-FM radio station, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd
caller and win the prize of a Porsche 944 S2. The bold Poulsen was
wanted by the FBI for federal computer hacking at the same time he was
winning the Porsche and $20,000 in prize money at a separate station.
Poulsen spent 51 months in a federal prison, the longest sentence of a
cybercriminal at that time.
Born : 30 November 1965 (age 54 years), Pasadena, California, United States
Other Name : Dark Dante
Awards : Webby Award for Websites - Law
Nominations : Goodreads Choice Awards Best Nonfiction
6. Anonymous
Anonymous is a
decentralized international activist/hacktivist collective/movement that
is widely known for its various cyber attacks against several
governments, government institutions and government agencies,
corporations, and the Church of Scientology.
Anonymous originated in 2003 on the imageboard 4chan representing the concept of many online and offline community users simultaneously existing as an anarchic, digitized global brain.
Purpose : Anti-cyber-surveillance, Anti-cyber-censorship, Internet activism, Internet vigilantism
Membership: Decentralized affinity group
Founded: 2003
7. Adrian Lamo
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.
In 2001, 20-year-old Adrian Lamo used an unprotected content management
tool at Yahoo to modify a Reuters article and add a fake quote
attributed to former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Lamo often hacked
systems and then notified both the press and his victims. In some cases,
he'd help clean up the mess to improve their security. However, Lamo took things too far in 2002, when he hacked
The New York Times' intranet, added himself to the list of expert
sources and began conducting research on high-profile public figures.
Lamo earned the moniker "The Homeless Hacker" because he preferred to
wander the streets with little more than a backpack and often had no
fixed address.
Born : 20 February 1981, Malden, Massachusetts, United States
Died : 14 March 2018, Wichita, Kansas, United States
Other Name : Adrián Lamo, R. Adrián Lamo
Education : Lowell High School, American River College...
Parents : Mary Lamo-Atwood, Mario Lamo-Jiménez
8. Jonathan James
Jonathan Joseph James was an American hacker who was the first
juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. The South
Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16
years old on the date of his sentencing.
James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile, at age 16, to
be sent to prison for hacking. James specialized in hacking high-profile
government systems, such as NASA and the Department of Defense. He was
reported to have stolen software worth more than $1.7 million.
Born : 12 December 1983, United States
Died : 18 May 2008, Pinecrest, Florida, United States
Education : Miami Palmetto Senior High School
9. George Hotz
George Francis Hotz, alias geohot, is an American security hacker.
He is known for developing iOS jailbreaks, reverse engineering the
PlayStation 3, and for the subsequent lawsuit against Sony. Since
September 2015, he is working on his vehicle automation machine learning
company comma.ai.
While George Hotz may be a renowned jailbreak artist, he's best known
for being named as the primary reason for the April 2011 PlayStation
breach. As one of the first hackers to jailbreak the Sony PlayStation 3,
Hotz found himself in the middle of a very mean, public, and messy
court battle with Sony -- perhaps because of his public release of his
jailbreaking methods. In stated retaliation, the hacker group Anonymous
attacked Sony in what has been the most costly security break of all
time. Hotz denied any responsibility for the attack and said, "Running
homebrew and exploring security on your devices is cool; hacking into
someone else's server and stealing databases of user info is not cool."
Born : 2 October 1989 (age 30 years), Glen Rock, New Jersey, United States
Other Name : Geohot
Notable work : Jailbreak, comma.ai
Education : Bergen County Academies
Parents : Marie Minichiello, George Hotz, Sr.
10. Gary McKinnon
Gary McKinnon is a Scottish systems administrator and hacker who
was accused in 2002 of perpetrating the "biggest military computer hack
of all time.
In 2002, a decidedly odd message appeared on a U.S. Army computer: "Your
security system is crap," it read. "I am Solo. I will continue to
disrupt at the highest levels." It was later found to be the work of
Gary McKinnon, a Scottish system administrator. Gary has been accused of
mounting the largest ever hack of U.S. government computer networks --
including Army, Air Force, Navy, and NASA systems. The court has
recommended that McKinnon be extradited to the United States to face
charges of illegally accessing 97 computers, causing $700,000 in damage.
Adding even more interest to McKinnon's actions is his insistence that
much of his hacking was in search of information on UFOs, information he
believed the U.S. government was hiding in its military computers.
Born : 10 February 1966 (age 54 years), Glasgow, United Kingdom
