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 |  Subject: Top 10 Most Famous Hackers of All Time  15/6/2010, 7:26 pm | |
| Black Hat Crackers The Internet abounds with hackers, known as crackers
or "black hats," who work to exploit computer systems.
They are the ones you've seen on the news being hauled away for
cybercrimes. Some of them do it for fun and curiosity, while others are
looking for personal gain. In this section we profile five of the most
famous and interesting "black hat" hackers.
- Jonathan James:
James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile to be sent to
prison for hacking. He was sentenced at 16 years old. In an anonymous PBS interview, he professes, "I was just
looking around, playing around. What was fun for me was a challenge to
see what I could pull off."
James's major intrusions targeted high-profile
organizations. He installed a backdoor into a Defense Threat Reduction
Agency server. The DTRA is an agency of the Department of Defense
charged with reducing the threat to the U.S. and its allies from
nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. The
backdoor he created enabled him to view sensitive emails and capture
employee usernames and passwords.
James also cracked into NASA computers, stealing
software worth approximately $1.7 million. According to the Department
of Justice, "The software supported the International Space Station's
physical environment, including control of the temperature and humidity
within the living space." NASA was forced to shut down its computer
systems, ultimately racking up a $41,000 cost. James explained that he
downloaded the code to supplement his studies on C programming, but
contended, "The code itself was crappy . . . certainly not worth $1.7
million like they claimed."
Given the extent of his intrusions, if James, also known as "c0mrade," had been an adult
he likely would have served at least 10 years. Instead, he was banned
from recreational computer use and was slated to serve a six-month
sentence under house arrest with probation. However, he served six
months in prison for violation of parole. Today, James asserts that
he's learned his lesson and might start a computer security company.
- Adrian Lamo: Lamo's claim to fame is his
break-ins at major organizations like The New York Times and Microsoft.
Dubbed the "homeless hacker," he used Internet connections at Kinko's,
coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions. In a profile article,
"He Hacks by Day, Squats by Night," Lamo reflects,
"I have a laptop in Pittsburgh, a change of clothes in D.C. It kind of
redefines the term multi-jurisdictional."
Lamo's intrusions consisted mainly of penetration
testing, in which he found flaws in security, exploited them and then
informed companies of their shortcomings. His hits include Yahoo!, Bank
of America, Citigroup and Cingular. When white hat hackers are hired
by companies to do penetration testing, it's legal. What Lamo did is
not.
When he broke into The New York Times' intranet,
things got serious. He added himself to a list of experts and viewed
personal information on contributors, including Social Security numbers.
Lamo also hacked into The Times' LexisNexis account to research
high-profile subject matter.
For his intrusion at The New York Times, Lamo was
ordered to pay approximately $65,000 in restitution. He was also
sentenced to six months of home confinement and two years of probation,
which expired January 16, 2007. Lamo is currently working as an
award-winning journalist and public speaker.
- Kevin Mitnick: A self-proclaimed "hacker
poster boy," Mitnick went through a highly publicized pursuit by
authorities. His mischief was hyped by the media but his actual
offenses may be less notable than his notoriety suggests. The Department of Justice describes him as "the
most wanted computer criminal in United States history." His exploits
were detailed in two movies: Freedom Downtime and Takedown.
Mitnick had a bit of hacking experience before
committing the offenses that made him famous. He started out exploiting
the Los Angeles bus punch card system to get free rides. Then, like
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, dabbled in phone phreaking. Although
there were numerous offenses, Mitnick was ultimately convicted for
breaking into the Digital Equipment Corporation's computer network and
stealing software.
Mitnick's mischief got serious when he went on a two
and a half year "coast-to-coast hacking spree." The CNN article, "Legendary computer hacker released from prison,"
explains that "he hacked into computers, stole corporate secrets,
scrambled phone networks and broke into the national defense warning
system." He then hacked into computer expert and fellow hacker Tsutomu
Shimomura's home computer, which led to his undoing.
Today, Mitnick has been able to move past his role as a
black hat hacker and become a productive member of society. He served
five years, about 8 months of it in solitary confinement, and is now a
computer security consultant, author and speaker.
- Kevin Poulsen: Also known as Dark Dante, Poulsen
gained recognition for his hack of LA radio's KIIS-FM phone lines,
which earned him a brand new Porsche, among other items. Law
enforcement dubbed him "the Hannibal Lecter of computer crime."
Authorities began to pursue Poulsen after he hacked into
a federal investigation database. During this pursuit, he further drew
the ire of the FBI by hacking into federal computers for wiretap
information.
His hacking specialty, however, revolved around telephones.
Poulsen's most famous hack, KIIS-FM, was accomplished by taking over
all of the station's phone lines. In a related feat,
Poulsen also "reactivated old Yellow Page escort telephone numbers for
an acquaintance who then ran a virtual escort agency." Later, when his
photo came up on the show Unsolved Mysteries, 1-800 phone lines for
the program crashed. Ultimately, Poulsen was captured in a supermarket
and served a sentence of five years.
Since serving time, Poulsen has worked as a
journalist. He is now a senior editor for Wired News. His most
prominent article details his work on identifying 744 sex offenders
with MySpace profiles.
- Robert Tappan Morris: Morris, son of former
National Security Agency scientist Robert Morris, is known as the
creator of the Morris Worm, the first computer worm to be
unleashed on the Internet. As a result of this crime, he was the first
person prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Morris wrote the code for the worm while he was a
student at Cornell. He asserts that he intended to use it to see how
large the Internet was. The worm, however, replicated itself
excessively, slowing computers down so that they were no longer usable.
It is not possible to know exactly how many computers were affected,
but experts estimate an impact of 6,000 machines. He was sentenced to
three years' probation, 400 hours of community service and a fined
$10,500.
Morris
is currently working as a tenured professor at the MIT Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He principally
researches computer network architectures including distributed hash
tables such as Chord and wireless mesh networks such as Roofnet.
White Hat Hackers Hackers that use their skills for good are classified
as "white hat." These white hats often work as
certified "Ethical Hackers," hired by companies to test the integrity of
their systems. Others, operate without company permission by bending
but not breaking laws and in the process have created some really cool
stuff. In this section we profile five white hat hackers and the
technologies they have developed.
- Stephen Wozniak: "Woz" is famous
for being the "other Steve" of Apple. Wozniak, along with current Apple
CEO Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computer. He has been awarded with
the National Medal of Technology as well as honorary doctorates from
Kettering University and Nova Southeastern University. Additionally,
Woz was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in September
2000.
Woz got his start in hacking making blue boxes,
devices that bypass telephone-switching mechanisms to make free
long-distance calls. After reading an article about phone phreaking in
Esquire, Wozniak called up his buddy Jobs. The pair did research on
frequencies, then built and sold blue boxes to their classmates in
college. Wozniak even used a blue box to call the Pope while pretending
to be Henry Kissinger.
Wozniak dropped out of college and came up with the
computer that eventually made him famous. Jobs had the bright idea to
sell the computer as a fully assembled PC board. The Steves sold
Wozniak's cherished scientific calculator and Jobs' VW van for capital
and got to work assembling prototypes in Jobs' garage. Wozniak designed
the hardware and most of the software. In the Letters
section of Woz.org, he recalls doing "what Ed Roberts and Bill Gates
and Paul Allen did and tons more, with no help." Wozniak and Jobs sold
the first 100 of the Apple I to a local dealer for $666.66 each.
Woz no longer works full time for Apple, focusing
primarily on philanthropy instead. Most notable is his function as
fairy godfather to the Los Gatos, Calif. School District. "Wozniak 'adopted'
the Los Gatos School District, providing students and teachers with
hands-on teaching and donations of state-of-the-art technology
equipment."
- Tim Berners-Lee: Berners-Lee is famed as the
inventor of the World Wide Web, the system that we use to access sites,
documents and files on the Internet. He has received numerous
recognitions, most notably the Millennium Technology Prize.
While a student at Oxford University, Berners-Lee was
caught hacking access with a friend and subsequently banned from
University computers. w3.org
reports, "Whilst [at Oxford], he built his first computer with a
soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television."
Technological innovation seems to have run in his genes, as
Berners-Lee's parents were mathematicians who worked on the Manchester
Mark1, one of the earliest electronic computers.
While working with CERN, a European nuclear research
organization, Berners-Lee created a hypertext prototype system that
helped researchers share and update information easily. He later
realized that hypertext could be joined with the Internet. Berners-Lee recounts
how he put them together: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and
connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web."
Since his creation of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee
founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT. The W3C describes itself
as "an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time
staff and the public work together to develop Web standards."
Berners-Lee's World Wide Web idea, as well as standards from the W3C,
is distributed freely with no patent or royalties due.
- Linus Torvalds: Torvalds fathered Linux, the very popular
Unix-based operating system. He calls himself "an engineer," and has
said that his aspirations are simple, "I just want to have fun making
the best damn operating system I can."
Torvalds got his start in computers with a Commodore
VIC-20, an 8-bit home computer. He then moved on to a Sinclair QL.
Wikipedia reports that he modified the Sinclair "extensively,
especially its operating system." Specifically, Torvalds hacks included
"an assembler and a text editor…as well as a few games."
Torvalds created the Linux
kernel in 1991, using the Minix operating system as inspiration. He
started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly and a terminal
driver. After that, he put out a call for others to contribute code,
which they did. Currently, only about 2 percent of the current Linux
kernel is written by Torvalds himself. The success of this public
invitation to contribute code for Linux is touted as one of the most
prominent examples of free/open source software.
Currently, Torvalds serves as the Linux ringleader,
coordinating the code that volunteer programmers contribute to the
kernel. He has had an asteroid named after him and received honorary
doctorates from Stockholm University and University of Helsinki. He was
also featured in Time Magazine's "60 Years of Heroes."
- Richard Stallman: Stallman's fame derives
from the GNU Project, which he founded to develop a free operating
system. For this, he's known as the father of free software. His "Serious Bio"
asserts, "Non-free software keeps users divided and helpless,
forbidden to share it and unable to change it. A free operating system
is essential for people to be able to use computers in freedom."
Stallman, who prefers to be called rms, got his
start hacking at MIT. He worked as a "staff hacker" on the Emacs
project and others. He was a critic of restricted computer access in
the lab. When a password system was installed, Stallman broke it down,
resetting passwords to null strings, then sent users messages informing
them of the removal of the password system.
Stallman's crusade for free software started with a
printer. At the MIT lab, he and other hackers were allowed to modify
code on printers so that they sent convenient alert messages. However, a
new printer came along – one that they were not allowed to modify. It
was located away from the lab and the absence of the alerts presented
an inconvenience. It was at this point that he was "convinced…of the
ethical need to require free software."
With this inspiration, he began work on GNU. Stallman
wrote an essay, "The GNU Project," in which he recalls choosing to
work on an operating system because it's a foundation, "the crucial
software to use a computer." At this time, the GNU/Linux version of the
operating system uses the Linux kernel started by Torvalds. GNU is
distributed under "copyleft," a method that employs copyright law to
allow users to use, modify, copy and distribute the software.
Stallman's life continues to revolve around the
promotion of free software. He works against movements like Digital
Rights Management (or as he prefers, Digital Restrictions Management)
through organizations like Free Software Foundation and League for
Programming Freedom. He has received extensive recognition for his work,
including awards, fellowships and four honorary doctorates.
- Tsutomu Shimomura: Shimomura reached fame in
an unfortunate manner: he was hacked by Kevin Mitnick. Following this
personal attack, he made it his cause to help the FBI capture him.
Shimomura's work to catch Mitnick is commendable, but
he is not without his own dark side. Author Bruce Sterling recalls:
"He pulls out this AT&T cellphone, pulls it out of the shrinkwrap,
finger-hacks it, and starts monitoring phone calls going up and down
Capitol Hill while an FBI agent is standing at his shoulder, listening
to him."
Shimomura out-hacked Mitnick to bring him down. Shortly
after finding out about the intrusion, he rallied a team and got to
work finding Mitnick. Using Mitnick's cell phone, they tracked him near
Raleigh-Durham International Airport. The article, "SDSC Computer Experts Help FBI Capture Computer
Terrorist" recounts how Shimomura pinpointed Mitnick's location.
Armed with a technician from the phone company, Shimomura "used a
cellular frequency direction-finding antenna hooked up to a laptop to
narrow the search to an apartment complex." Mitnick was arrested
shortly thereafter. Following the pursuit, Shimomura wrote a book about
the incident with journalist John Markoff, which was later turned into
a movie.
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