Be it for fun, personal benefit or simply curiosity, the sharp brains, publicly known as : "crackers", "hackers" or "black hats" work to exploit computer system and none of us, intelligent minds can easily track or trace what they have building up within themselves !! On the other hand, stand the proud "white hats", who use their brains and skills for good, are termed as "Ethical Hackers" and are hired by companies to keep themselves yet safer !! So, here are the 10 most famous hackers of the Web World -
Black Hats
• Jonathan James - He was the first juvenile, 16 yrs old, to be sent to prison for hacking. His interest was in high-profile organizations, which began just for fun…a challenge to see what he could pull out. 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. Nonetheless, the smart guy also cracked into NASA computers, stealing software worth approximately $1.7 million.
• Adrian Lamo – As said in a profile article, “He hacks by day, Squats by night”. This famous "homeless hacker," used Internet connections at Kinko's, coffee shops and libraries to do his hackings. He entered The New York Times' intranet and added himself to a list of experts and viewed personal information on contributors, including Social Security numbers and much much more and a series of such episodes was followed by imprisonment and heavy fines.
• Kevin Mitnick - Mitnick was convicted for breaking into the Digital Equipment Corporation's computer network and stealing software, but he leisurely began with exploiting the Los Angeles bus punch card system to get free rides. The CNN article says, "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." But good gracious, 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, held expertise in telephone lines hacking which earned him a Porsche!! Poulsen's most famous hack, KIIS-FM, was accomplished by taking over all of the station's phone lines. Ultimately, Poulsen was captured in a supermarket and served a sentence of five years.
• Robert Tappan Morris - Morris Worm, the first computer worm to be unleashed on the Internet was created by him, son of former National Security Agency scientist. He says he just wanted to use it to see how vast the internet was but it replicated itself excessively, slowing down computers to such an extent that they were no longer usable. He was sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service and a fined $10,500.
White Hats
• Stephen Wozniak - His start in hacking was with making blue boxes, devices that bypass telephone-switching mechanisms to make free long-distance calls. Stephen was the one who c0founded the Apple computers and fully assembled PC concept.
• 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. Initially, he created a hypertext prototype system that helped researchers share and update information easily. He later realized that hypertext could be joined with the Internet. Eay to remember, he is the founder of W3C !!
• Linus Torvalds - Torvalds hacks included "an assembler and a text editor…as well as a few games." And in due course of time, he was well known as father of the Linux, the very popular Unix-based operating system. He has had an asteroid named after him and received honorary doctorates .
• Richard Stallman - 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." And he became ‘ Father of Free Software”.
• Tsutomu Shimomura - he was hacked by Kevin Mitnick, the blach hat. 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. Shimomura, later, wrote a book about the incident with journalist John Markoff, which was later turned into a movie.
So, wasn’t that amazing !!!
