Long before the nation-state intervened, individual hackers had their own stage.

Nowadays, computer hacking and ransomware are commonplace. Just this week, the United States successfully recovered $6 million paid for ransomware attacks against multiple companies. However, there was a time when organized hacker groups carried out activities in windowless offices around the world, seeking economic or political benefits. In that era, most hacking activities were carried out by lonely teenagers working outside their parents’ bedroom. Their only goal was the sheer pleasure of obtaining information.

Below, we will look at some of the most famous-or, according to your point of view, the notorious-hackers of all time. But first, let's delve into the history of hacker attacks. 

You might argue that the idea of ​​hacking began at MIT in the 1950s and 1960s, when the term "hack" was used for elegant or enlightening solutions to problems. Many of these "hacks" are actually pranks. One of the most extravagant people saw a replica of the campus police car erected on the large dome of the institute. Over time, the term became associated with early computer programming scenarios at MIT and elsewhere.

From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the term has been extended to general computing dictionaries.

Hacking attacks as we know them began in the early 1970s, with the increase in the use of mainframe computers and distributed computing. The early adopters of these technologies were government organizations and the military. The Air Force conducted the first penetration test of their system in 1971, using what became known as the "Tiger Team."

In 1980, the New York Times described hackers as "technical experts; skilled, usually young computer programmers, who explore the defenses of computer systems almost whimsically, looking for the limits and possibilities of machines." Early hacker groups included the 414s-a group of 6 Milwaukee teenagers who used cheap personal computers, analog modems and simple passwords to break into everything from Los Alamos National Library to Safe Pacific Bank between 1982 and 1983. Computers of American institutions-hacker technology. 

By 1982, groups like the Legion of Doom, Masters of Deception, and Dead Cow Cult had turned hacking into a widespread subculture and had their own magazines. John Badham's 1983 sci-fi movie "WarGames" promoted this image of a hacker as a smart, rebellious, and playful nerd.

In the 1980s, as the number of personal computers increased, so did hacking. In response, the US Congress passed the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" in 1986, and in the same year, the first group of computer hackers were tried. However, with the introduction and development of the World Wide Web, since the early 1990s, more serious cybercriminals have appeared. 

Hackers test not only technical systems, but also legal and ethical systems. Hackers are roughly divided into so-called "white hat hackers" and "black hat hackers". The difference is that white hat hackers believe that they carry out hacking attacks for greater benefit. They identify system weaknesses and remind owners that they usually do not destroy data, although they sometimes hack in a legal way for profit.

On the other hand, black-hat hackers have no scruples about stealing or destroying data. Profit and causing damage occupy an important place in their list of motivations, and they often brag about their achievements online. Although their motivations may be different, all top hackers have one thing in common, that is, they have been passionate about technology since they were young. Currently, our list of the most famous hackers only includes men, but we are sure that some female hackers possess some evil skills.

Swartz was born in Highland Park, Illinois in 1986, and showed a talent for programming early on. By 1999, Swartz created the user-created encyclopedia The Info Network and won the ArsDigita Award.

By the age of 14, Swartz was a member of the working group that wrote the RSS 1.0 web syndication specification. RSS stands for truly simple syndication, allowing applications and users to access website updates, allowing news aggregators to constantly monitor new content on the website.

After studying for a year at Stanford University, Swartz was admitted to Y Combinator’s first summer founder program, where he first worked on Infogami, which was used to support the Internet Archive’s open library project and is a Reddit’s One of the builders. When Condé Nast acquired Reddit, Swartz became a millionaire.

In 2008, Swartz used his hacking skills to download 2.7 million federal court documents stored in the Public Access Court Electronic Records (PACER) database. Although it is technically free, the download fee for PACER is $0.10 per page, and Swartz will provide the downloaded document online for free.

In 2010, Swartz became a researcher at Harvard University’s Safra Institutional Corruption Research Laboratory. This position gives Swartz access to the JSTOR digital library, which contains past and current issues of digitized academic journals and books.

In September 2010, JSTOR began to be hit by a large number of download requests from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) IP address. The request comes from a laptop computer connected to a network switch in an open wiring closet. University officials installed a video camera in the closet to record Swartz.

While JSTOR reached a settlement with Swartz and allowed him to return the downloaded files, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit against Swartz. He was arrested near the Harvard University campus on the night of January 6, 2011.

Swartz has been charged with dozens of charges, including deliberate break-in and theft. Swartz faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. However, during the plea negotiations, prosecutors let Swartz serve six months in a low-security prison.

Swartz feared that his career would end if he was labeled a felon. He rejected the deal, but on January 11, 2013, he committed suicide. At his memorial service, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, delivered a eulogy. A document released after Swartz's death showed that both MIT and JSTOR required prosecutors to drop all charges against Swartz.

June 1, 1990, was in the middle of the radio gift boom. Los Angeles radio station KISS-FM presented a Porsche 44 S2 roadster to the 102nd caller. It turned out to be a young man named Kevin Poulsen, but Poulsen didn’t win fair, he hacked the radio station. Phone line.

Paulson controlled 25 telephone lines of the radio station and blocked all calls after receiving the 101st call, making him the 102 caller. Government contractor SRI, RAND Corporation and the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

When he was arrested, Poulsen was only 17 years old, and his only punishment was the loss of his Radio Shack computer. SRI even hired Poulsen to conduct penetration tests on computer systems at the price of $35,000 per year for the prince at the time.

Everything in Poulsen went smoothly until a man named "John Anderson" failed to pay the bill for his storage unit. The owner of the storage room opened the locker and immediately called the police. The storage room contains blanks for lock openers, fake ID cards and birth certificates, as well as telephone company communication equipment, manuals and tools.

Poulsen disappeared underground. In October 1990, his case appeared on the TV show "Unsolved Mysteries". When the operator received a prompt on hundreds of mobile phones, all of the phones suddenly crashed.

When the FBI agent appeared at Poulsen's home in Los Angeles, the phone rang, and it was Poulsen who was online, mocking the G-Men. When they tracked down the phone, it returned to be from Pacific Bell itself.

After being found and convicted in 1991, Poulsen served five years in prison. After his release, he became a journalist and became the senior editor of Wired News in 2005. In 2019, Poulsen exposed the person responsible for publishing the fake video, which showed the speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi being vague. Earlier, his work identified 744 registered sex offenders using MySpace to solicit sex from children. Poulsen, Aaron Swartz, and James Dolan designed and developed SecureDrop, which journalists around the world use to communicate securely with their sources.

Calce, known as the "mafia boy", got his first computer when he was 6 years old. On February 7, 2000, when Calce was 14 years old, he launched a distributed denial of service (DDS) attack on Yahoo! This was the largest search engine on the Internet at the time.

Calce did not stop there, he also defeated eBay, CNN and Amazon in the following week. The initial attack on Dell was unsuccessful, but the subsequent attack was successful. When Karls claimed responsibility, he attracted the attention of the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

On September 12, 2001, the Montreal Youth Court sentenced Karls to eight months of house arrest, one year of probation, and restrictions on his use of the Internet. Some analysts believe that Calce’s attack cost is $1.2 billion, while Canadian courts consider this figure to be $7.5 million.

Calce's attack led to the collapse of Web 1.0 that occurred in the early 2000s to a certain extent. Today, Calce is a white hat hacker who helps the company identify security vulnerabilities in the system and design better security features. In 2008, Karls wrote a book, "The Mafia: How I Hacked the Internet and Why It's Still Being Hacked".

Not everyone can say that they almost started World War III, but Bevan and Pryce definitely can. When they contacted each other on the Bulletin Board System (BBS) in their hometown of Britain, they were all teenagers.

After accidentally discovering a file cache about UFOs, government cover-ups, and conspiracy theories on the website of a hacker colleague, Bevan made it his mission to uncover the hidden truth of UFOs.

By April 1994, Price had made multiple computer intrusions at the Pentagon, the Roman laboratory at Griffith Air Force Base in New York, NASA and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was a military UFO file. Repository.

From the Rome laboratory, Pryce visited a computer at the Korea Institute of Atomic Research and downloaded their database to Griffis's computer. If North Korea detects an invasion from a US military base, the result may be catastrophic, but the facility is actually located in South Korea.

Although Pryce was arrested in London in 1994, it took another two years before Bevan was traced in Cardiff, Wales. In March 1996, Pryce was fined 1,200 pounds and the charges against Bevan were dropped. Bevan went on to become a software developer for Nintendo, and then founded his own software company.

As a typical definition of a black hat hacker, Gonzalez was just in his teens when he formed the ShadowCrew hacker organization, which processed more than 1.5 million stolen credit card and ATM numbers. They also sell forged documents such as passports, driving licenses, social security cards, credit cards, debit cards, birth certificates, college student ID cards and health insurance cards.

In addition to Gonzales, there are hackers from the United States and Bulgaria, Belarus, Canada, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, and the Netherlands. However, Gonzalez avoided imprisonment by providing evidence to the Secret Service.

It was during his cooperation with the authorities that Gonzalez invaded TJX Companies, the parent company of TJMaxx and Marshalls, as well as DSW, Office Max, Barnes & Noble and Sports Authority. More than 45.6 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen in TJX Company alone.

The authorities confiscated more than $1.6 million in cash from Gonzalez. On March 25, 2010, Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in prison and ordered to confiscate $1.65 million, a Miami apartment and his BMW 330i. He is scheduled to be released on December 4, 2025.

Between August 1999 and October of the same year, authorities detected intrusions into the computer systems of BellSouth, the Miami-Dade School District, and the computer systems of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) under the Department of Defense.

The data includes the source code of the International Space Station, which controls the temperature and humidity in the living space.

The authorities tracked the break-in to Pinecrest, Florida, and raided the house on January 26, 2000, and arrested the teenager James. Through the plea agreement, James was sentenced to seven months of house arrest and probation. When a routine test found drugs in James' system, his probation was revoked and he was serving six months in an Alabama jail.

In January 2008, when TJX and other companies were hacked, the authorities discovered that people with the initials "JJ" were involved in the plan. Although James swears that he has nothing to do with that crime, but he may be worried that he will be prosecuted, and he committed suicide. He left a suicide note, part of the content is "I have no confidence in the'justice' system."

As a child, Los Angeles resident Kevin Mitnick was always fascinated by the way things worked. His curiosity brought him into contact with amateur radio in high school, and then Mitnick became interested in the bus system in Los Angeles. He noticed that the bus driver used a punch to mark the transfer form. He persuaded a bus driver to tell him where to buy a similar punch and told him that it was used for school projects.

Mitnick then sneaked into the trash can next to the bus company's garage, where he threw away the unused transfer order, and soon he was able to ride wherever he wanted for free. Next, Mitnick became fascinated by Pacific Bell's telephone system. He often sneaked into the trash can outside Pacific Bell's office, looking for discarded manuals. Mitnick was suspected of invading the North American Defense Command (NORAD), and he has always denied commanding, which became the inspiration for the 1983 movie "Game of War".

In 1979, when Mitnick was 16 years old, he hacked into the digital equipment company's system and copied their RSTS/E operating system there. For this reason, he began serving a 12-month sentence in 1988 and was released under supervision for three years. Just before the end of the three-year probation, Mitnick hacked into Pacific Bell’s computer and issued an arrest warrant.

Mitnick fled and stayed in lam for two and a half years, during which time he used a cloned cell phone to hack into the computers of dozens of companies. On February 15, 1995, the FBI caught Mitnick in his apartment in Raleigh, North Carolina. He was charged with wire fraud, interception of wire transfers or electronic communications, and unauthorized access to federal computers.

After pleading guilty, Mitnick was sentenced to five years in prison. After the FBI persuaded Judge Mitnick to whistle on a public phone in the prison, visit the North American Air Defense Command and start a nuclear war, he was held in solitary confinement for eight months. Mitnick denied that it was possible and accused media reports of creating an atmosphere of fear around his abilities.

In an interview with CNN, Mitnick stated that his claim that he might hack NORAD was based on "fictional events related to real events, for example, when I viewed the source code as a hacker, I obtained the code from Motorola and Nokia. That is Really, that’s the truth...but many of the accusations I have not been charged. If I hacked into the North American Air Defense Command or wiretapped the FBI, I would definitely be charged. I was in trouble mainly because of my actions. But, because According to media reports, I was regarded as "Osama Ben Mitnick".

After being released from prison in January 2000, Mitnick became a computer security consultant and established Mitnick Security Consulting LLC. In 2002, Mitnick wrote a book about his accomplishments called "The Art of Deception." In addition, "New York Times" writer John Markov and security researcher Ken Shimomura co-authored a book called "Takedown" that describes the hunt for Mitnick. That book became the 2000 movie "Tracking."

If you want to learn more about hackers and hackers, some good books include: Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick and The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll.

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