To accompany our recent piece on the ever shifting definition of hacker and the growing trend in New York of body hacking among the tech set, Betabeat thought it would be fun to look back at ten of the coolest hacks of all time. We asked Alan Wlasuk, CEO of 403 Web Security, an old school MIT hacker and long time security expert, to give us his top ten.
Gary McKinnon – In 2002, a decidedly odd message appeared on a US 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 systems administrator. McKinnon suffers from Asperger's syndrome, a condition with symptoms that certainly fit Gary’s actions: highly intelligent with an accomplished understanding of complex systems. Sufferers often have severe difficulty reading social cues and grasping the impact of their often-obsessive behavior. Gary has been accused of mounting the largest ever hack of United States 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. To add even more interest to McKinnon’s actions is his insistence that much of his hacking was in search of information on UFO’s, information he believed the US government was hiding in its military computers. (Image from Wired)
A renowned jailbreak artist, his name will be forever linked to the to 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 Hotz’s public release of his jailbreaking methods. In a stated retaliation to Sony’s breach of the unstated rules of jailbreaking (never prosecute), the hacker group Anonymous attacked Sony in what would be the most costly security break of all time to date. Hackers broke into the PlayStation Network and stole personal information of some 77 million users. 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". (Image from IT Security Column)
James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile, at age 16, to be sent to prison for hacking. James was 15 years old at the time of his first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. At an amazingly young age of 15, James specialized in hacking high-profile government system such as NASA and the Department of Defense. He was reported to have stolen software worth over $1.7 million. He died on May 18, 2008, at the age of 25, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The words in his suicide note provide some insight into this obviously brilliant but troubled youth who thought he would be arrested for cyber crimes he did not commit: "I have no faith in the 'justice' system. Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control.” (Image from the James Family)
Smith’s fame comes as being the author of the infamous e-mail virus known as Melissa. According to Smith, the Melissa virus was never meant to cause harm, but its simple means of propagation (each infected computer in turn sent out multiple infected emails) overloaded computer systems and servers around the world. Smith’s virus takes on an unusual turn in that it was originally hidden in a file containing passwords to 80 well-known pornography websites. The name Melissa was taken from a lap dancer Smith met while on a trip in Florida. As far as obsessions go, Smith appeared to be a typical teenage boy. Even though over 60,000 email viruses have been discovered, Smith is the only person to go to federal prison in the United States for sending one. (Image from Inettricks.com)
The now famous founders of Apple Computers, spent part of their youth as hackers. Circa 1971 the pair began building Blue Box devices. Per Wikipedia: An early freaking tool, the blue box is an electronic device that simulates a telephone operator’s dialing console. It functions by replicating the tones used to switch long-distance calls and using them to route the user’s own call, bypassing the normal switching mechanism. The most typical use of a blue box was to place free telephone calls) and selling them to fellow students at the University of California, Berkeley. Jobs and Wozniak started their Blue Box sales career after reading a 1971 Esquire article on John T. Draper and his phone phreaking blue box. After founding Apple, Jobs and Wozniak went on to hire Draper, who proved to be a valued but difficult employee. (Image from technophonics.com)
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 cyber criminal at that time. (Image from Los Angeles Police Department)
Also known as MafiaBoy, was arrested in February 2000 for launching denial-of-service attack that brought down many of the Internet’s largest sites, including Amazon, eBay and Yahoo. Michael’s lawyer 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 (amateur using tools and techniques supplied by others). His attacks, however successful, were implemented computer scripts that clogged networks full of garbage data. (Image from Graham Hughes for The Canadian Press)
Working on his laptop in 1994 from his St. Petersburg, Russia apartment, Vladimir Levin transferred $10 million from Citibank clients to his own accounts around the world - seeming like the opening of a James Bond movie. 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. During Levin’s 1997 trial in the United States, he was reported to have orchestrated the first ever internet bank raid. The truth is Levin’s ability to transfer Citibank client funds to his own accounts was enabled through stolen account numbers and PINs. Much of remote banking in 1994 relied on client access to banking systems through dial-up connections, with account information being coded through the phone’s number keypad. Levin’s scam was a simple interception of a client’s call while recording the punched in account numbers. (Image from QuanTriMang.com)
On November 2, 1988, Robert Morris released a worm that brought down one-tenth of the Internet - crippling more than 6,000 computer systems. 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. Therefore, 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. Morris was one of the first to be tried and convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act but with community service and a fine as his penalty. The argument for such a light sentence was that the worm didn't destroy the contents of affected computers. (Image from Anthropoligical Research on the Contemporary Studio)
Once considered the most-wanted cyber criminal in the United States, Mitnick is the poster child of computer hacking. Kevin’s high-school years were spent in a state of fascination with the country’s phone systems, using that time to practice his form of phone phreaking -- a type of hacking that included an early form of social engineering (scamming operators) and computer hacking to gain access to and modify telephony switching systems. His quick rise to criminal cyber fame is said to be primarily due a 1994 front page article in the New York Times, by John Markoff that prompted senate investigations. Markoff described Mitnick as "Combining technical wizardry with the ages-old guile of a grifter, Kevin Mitnick is a computer programmer run amok." After a very public 2-year chase, arrest and incarceration the hacker community collectively rose in protest to what they viewed as an unjust witch hunt. (Image from Rishl's Geek World)
