Top Hackers Till Date
In common usage, a hacker is a person who breaks into computers.The subculture that has evolved around hackers is often referred to as the computer underground. Proponents claim to be motivated by artistic and political ends, but are often unconcerned about the use of criminal means to achieve them.
Claim to fame:
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. 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.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.
Gary McKinnon, 40, 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 US $700,000 (400,000 pounds; euro 588,000) in damage.
The youth, known as "cOmrade" on the Internet, pleaded guilty to intercepting 3,300 email messages at one of the Defense Department's most sensitive operations and stealing data from 13 NASA computers, including some devoted to the new International Space Station. James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile to be sent to prison for hacking. He was sentenced at 16 years old. 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.
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.”Dubbed the “homeless hacker,” he used Internet connections at Kinko’s, coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions. 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.
Also known as Dark Dante, Poulsen gained recognition for his hack of LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines, (taing over all of the station’s 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, 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.
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.
Levin accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank via their dial-up wire transfer service (Financial Institutions Citibank Cash Manager) and transferred funds to accounts set up by accomplices in Finland, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.In 2005 an alleged member of the former St. Petersburg hacker group, claiming to be one of the original Citibank penetrators, published under the name ArkanoiD a memorandum on popular Provider.net.ru website dedicated to telecom market.According to him, Levin was not actually a scientist (mathematician, biologist or the like) but a kind of ordinary system administrator who managed to get hands on the ready data about how to penetrate in Citibank machines and then exploit them.ArkanoiD emphasized all the communications were carried over X.25 network and the Internet was not involved. ArkanoiD’s group in 1994 found out Citibank systems were unprotected and it spent several weeks examining the structure of the bank’s USA-based networks remotely. Members of the group played around with systems’ tools (e.g. were installing and running games) and were unnoticed by the bank’s staff. Penetrators did not plan to conduct a robbery for their personal safety and stopped their activities at some time. Someone of them later handed over the crucial access data to Levin (reportedly for the stated $100).
David Smith, the author of the e-mail virus known as Melissa, which swamped computers around the world, spreading like a malicious chain letter. He was facing nearly 40 years in jail . About 63,000 viruses have rolled through the Internet, causing an estimated $65 billion in damage, but Smith is the only person to go to federal prison in the United States for sending one.
Abene (born 1972), better known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker from New York City. Phiber Optik was once a member of the Hacker Groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception. In 1994, he served a one-year prison sentence for conspiracy and unauthorized access to computer and telephone systems.
He's the student that created the "I love you" virus that caused 10 billions of dollars in damage worldwide. Love bug Virus is considered one of the most spectacular virus outbreaks in cyber history. It was supposedly a password-stealing thesis proposal(was rejected by his school).
He was the creator of one of the deadly virus of all time "Chernobyl computer virus " which had melted down many computers worldwide.Chernobyl or spacefiller is a Microsoft Windows 9x computer virus which first emerged in 1998. It is one of the most damaging viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in most cases destroying the system BIOS.
"Mudge" along with fellow hackers told the committee that computer security is so lax, they could disable the entire Internet in a half-hour.
One of the world's top computer security experts. Shimomura helped Federal officials track down and arrest computer hacker Kevin Mitnick in Raleigh Feb. 15, 1995 in connection with a break-in on Shimomura's computer.
Johansen, who became a hero to computer hackers and was deemed a villain by Hollywood, is on trial for writing and distributing a program called DeCSS, software which makes it possible to copy protected DVD films. Prosecutors have asked to have his computers confiscated and called for him to pay $1,400 in court costs.
Russian computer programmer who was charged with violating copyrights, Sklyarov was jailed after developing software that allows the user to circumvent the copyright protections in Adobe Systems eBook reader program.
Moran, known on the Web as "Coolio," pleaded guilty to hacking into national computer sites on year 2000 belonging to the U.S Army, the Air Force and the anti-drug DARE.
"Woz" is famous for being the "other Steve" of Apple. Wozniak, along with current Apple CEO Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computer. 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.
Known online as dmr and Ken, they were the the driving creative force behind Bell Labs' legendary computer science operating group, Ritchie and Thompson created UNIX in 1969. An elegant, open operating system for minicomputers, UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language. They used Plan 9, the next-generation operating system created as the natural descendant of UNIX by Thompson and Bell Labs colleague Rob Pike. Although Ritchie is the author of the popular C programming language, his favorite language is Alef. Thompson, an amateur pilot, once traveled to Moscow to fly a MiG-29. Dennis Ritchie is currently the head of Lucent Technology's System Software Research Department, while Ken Thompson has retired from both Bell Labs and the hacker spotlight.
Known online as Julf, he operated the world's most popular anonymous remailer, called penet.fi, until he closed up shop in September 1996. Helsingius' troubles started when he was raided in 1995 by the Finnish police after the Church of Scientology complained that a penet.fi customer was posting the "church's" secrets on the Net. Helsingius mothballed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer's real e-mail address. He ran the world's busiest remailer on a run-of-the mill 486 with a 200-megabyte harddrive, and he never felt the need himself to post anonymously. Johan Helsingius now lends his cyber knowledge to communication companies worldwide.
The year was 1981. The Reagan administration was in its infancy. "Elvira" was setting the Billboard charts on fire. And a young hacker was about to become the first person ever arrested for a computer crime. Eighteen months earlier, Ian Murphy (a.k.a. "Captain Zap") along with three cohorts, hacked into AT&T's computers and changed their internal clocks. People suddenly received late-night discounts in the afternoon, while others who waited until midnight to use the phone were greeted with hefty bills. For his part in the crime, Murphy was greeted with 1,000 hours of community service and 2 1/2 years probation (considerably less than what fellow hackers would receive today). He also became the inspiration for the movie Sneakers. Today Murphy, like other hackers, runs his own security company — IAM Secure Data Systems, Inc. For $5,000 a day plus expenses, Murphy has dressed up as a phone-company employee and cracked a bank's security system, aided a murder investigation, and conducted studies in airline terrorism. But Murphy's great love is still hacking into company security systems — with their permission — and helping them guard against potential break-ins.
Cap'n Crunch figured out how to make free phone calls using a plastic prize whistle he found in a cereal box. Cap'n Crunch introduced generations of hackers to the glorious concept of phone "phreaking."
Father of Linux is a good hacker of all time.
Don't know why we missed him the first time out: Among other inventions, Dr. Engelbart is responsible for hypertext, windows, cross-file editing and the mouse. There would be no Net hacking without him. Engelbart first thought of hypermedia while serving as a radar technician during World War II. Seeing information displayed on a radar screen, he imagined sitting in front of a similar display, "flying around" in an information space. The engineer pursued his wild ideas in his own lab at the Stanford Research Institute, and first demonstrated his hypermedia "oNLine System" (or NLS) and computer mouse to a stunned audience in 1968.
There are numbers of Hackers in the world till date, Few has become famous by their Black hat work and few of them are famous by their Ethical Hacking. Below is separate list of World's All Time Best Hackers and Crackers. Although I represent them by Hackers only because whatever they did, was wrong but one thing is sure they were Brilliant. Hacking is not a work of simple mind, only Intelligent Mind can do that.
Kevin Mitnick
Claim to fame:
The first hacker to have his face immortalized on an FBI "Most Wanted" poster. His status as a repeat offender -- a teenage hacker who couldn't grow up -- earned Mitnick the nickname The Lost Boy of Cyberspace.
First encountered a computer:
As a teenager. Mitnick couldn't afford a computer, so he hung out in a Radio Shack store. He used the store's demo models and modem to dial other computers.
Unusual tools:
During the three years he was on the lam, Mitnick used Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as a message drop and to communicate with his friends.
Little-known fact:
Sentenced to a year in a residential treatment center, Mitnick enrolled in a 12-step program to rid himself of what a judge agreed was his "computer addiction."
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. 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.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.Gary McKinnon
Gary McKinnon, 40, 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 US $700,000 (400,000 pounds; euro 588,000) in damage.Jonathan James
The youth, known as "cOmrade" on the Internet, pleaded guilty to intercepting 3,300 email messages at one of the Defense Department's most sensitive operations and stealing data from 13 NASA computers, including some devoted to the new International Space Station. James gained notoriety when he became the first juvenile to be sent to prison for hacking. He was sentenced at 16 years old. 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.Adrian Lamo
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.”Dubbed the “homeless hacker,” he used Internet connections at Kinko’s, coffee shops and libraries to do his intrusions. 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 Poulsen
Also known as Dark Dante, Poulsen gained recognition for his hack of LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines, (taing over all of the station’s 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, 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.
Vladimir Levin
Levin accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank via their dial-up wire transfer service (Financial Institutions Citibank Cash Manager) and transferred funds to accounts set up by accomplices in Finland, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.In 2005 an alleged member of the former St. Petersburg hacker group, claiming to be one of the original Citibank penetrators, published under the name ArkanoiD a memorandum on popular Provider.net.ru website dedicated to telecom market.According to him, Levin was not actually a scientist (mathematician, biologist or the like) but a kind of ordinary system administrator who managed to get hands on the ready data about how to penetrate in Citibank machines and then exploit them.ArkanoiD emphasized all the communications were carried over X.25 network and the Internet was not involved. ArkanoiD’s group in 1994 found out Citibank systems were unprotected and it spent several weeks examining the structure of the bank’s USA-based networks remotely. Members of the group played around with systems’ tools (e.g. were installing and running games) and were unnoticed by the bank’s staff. Penetrators did not plan to conduct a robbery for their personal safety and stopped their activities at some time. Someone of them later handed over the crucial access data to Levin (reportedly for the stated $100).David Smith
David Smith, the author of the e-mail virus known as Melissa, which swamped computers around the world, spreading like a malicious chain letter. He was facing nearly 40 years in jail . About 63,000 viruses have rolled through the Internet, causing an estimated $65 billion in damage, but Smith is the only person to go to federal prison in the United States for sending one.Mark Abene
Abene (born 1972), better known by his pseudonym Phiber Optik, is a computer security hacker from New York City. Phiber Optik was once a member of the Hacker Groups Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception. In 1994, he served a one-year prison sentence for conspiracy and unauthorized access to computer and telephone systems.
Phiber Optik was a high-profile hacker in the early 1990s, appearing in The New York Times, Harper’s, Esquire, in debates and on television. Phiber Optik is an important figure in the 1995 non-fiction book Masters of Deception — The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace
Onel A. de Guzman
He's the student that created the "I love you" virus that caused 10 billions of dollars in damage worldwide. Love bug Virus is considered one of the most spectacular virus outbreaks in cyber history. It was supposedly a password-stealing thesis proposal(was rejected by his school).
el A. de Guzman, a Filipino computer student, Greatest Hacker of all time. He was creator of "Love Bug" virus that crippled computer e-mail systems worldwide.
Chen Ing-hau
He was the creator of one of the deadly virus of all time "Chernobyl computer virus " which had melted down many computers worldwide.Chernobyl or spacefiller is a Microsoft Windows 9x computer virus which first emerged in 1998. It is one of the most damaging viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in most cases destroying the system BIOS.Mudge
"Mudge" along with fellow hackers told the committee that computer security is so lax, they could disable the entire Internet in a half-hour.
Mudge , of its true name Peiter Zatko , is the former managing director and researcher as a chief of L0pht Heavy Industries, a famous group of Hacker S specialist in Computer security.
Tsutomu Shimomura
One of the world's top computer security experts. Shimomura helped Federal officials track down and arrest computer hacker Kevin Mitnick in Raleigh Feb. 15, 1995 in connection with a break-in on Shimomura's computer.
To state the obvious: Shimomura outhacked and outsmarted Kevin Mitnick, the nation's most infamous cracker/phreaker, in early 1994. After colleagues at the San Diego Supercomputing Center informed Shimomura that someone had stolen hundreds of software programs and files from his work station, the computer security expert worked on a tip to track the thief through the WELL. A labyrinthine telco trail eventually led to an apartment complex in Raleigh, N.C., where FBI agents apprehended Mitnick. (They've had less luck tracking down Mitnick's alleged Israeli accomplice.)
But that's not all: A consultant to the FBI, Air Force and National Security Agency, Shimomura is rumored to have engaged in darkside dabblings himself. As Jon Littman notes, "I've always wondered why he wrote that program to eavesdrop on cell phone calls. Somehow it doesn't sound like an NSA contract."
Jon Lech Johansen
Johansen, who became a hero to computer hackers and was deemed a villain by Hollywood, is on trial for writing and distributing a program called DeCSS, software which makes it possible to copy protected DVD films. Prosecutors have asked to have his computers confiscated and called for him to pay $1,400 in court costs.Dmitry Sklyarov
Russian computer programmer who was charged with violating copyrights, Sklyarov was jailed after developing software that allows the user to circumvent the copyright protections in Adobe Systems eBook reader program.Dennis Moran
Moran, known on the Web as "Coolio," pleaded guilty to hacking into national computer sites on year 2000 belonging to the U.S Army, the Air Force and the anti-drug DARE.Stephen Wozniak
"Woz" is famous for being the "other Steve" of Apple. Wozniak, along with current Apple CEO Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple Computer. 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.Dennis Ritchie & Ken Thompson
Known online as dmr and Ken, they were the the driving creative force behind Bell Labs' legendary computer science operating group, Ritchie and Thompson created UNIX in 1969. An elegant, open operating system for minicomputers, UNIX helped users with general computing, word processing and networking, and soon became a standard language. They used Plan 9, the next-generation operating system created as the natural descendant of UNIX by Thompson and Bell Labs colleague Rob Pike. Although Ritchie is the author of the popular C programming language, his favorite language is Alef. Thompson, an amateur pilot, once traveled to Moscow to fly a MiG-29. Dennis Ritchie is currently the head of Lucent Technology's System Software Research Department, while Ken Thompson has retired from both Bell Labs and the hacker spotlight.ohan Helsingius
Known online as Julf, he operated the world's most popular anonymous remailer, called penet.fi, until he closed up shop in September 1996. Helsingius' troubles started when he was raided in 1995 by the Finnish police after the Church of Scientology complained that a penet.fi customer was posting the "church's" secrets on the Net. Helsingius mothballed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer's real e-mail address. He ran the world's busiest remailer on a run-of-the mill 486 with a 200-megabyte harddrive, and he never felt the need himself to post anonymously. Johan Helsingius now lends his cyber knowledge to communication companies worldwide.Ian Murphy
The year was 1981. The Reagan administration was in its infancy. "Elvira" was setting the Billboard charts on fire. And a young hacker was about to become the first person ever arrested for a computer crime. Eighteen months earlier, Ian Murphy (a.k.a. "Captain Zap") along with three cohorts, hacked into AT&T's computers and changed their internal clocks. People suddenly received late-night discounts in the afternoon, while others who waited until midnight to use the phone were greeted with hefty bills. For his part in the crime, Murphy was greeted with 1,000 hours of community service and 2 1/2 years probation (considerably less than what fellow hackers would receive today). He also became the inspiration for the movie Sneakers. Today Murphy, like other hackers, runs his own security company — IAM Secure Data Systems, Inc. For $5,000 a day plus expenses, Murphy has dressed up as a phone-company employee and cracked a bank's security system, aided a murder investigation, and conducted studies in airline terrorism. But Murphy's great love is still hacking into company security systems — with their permission — and helping them guard against potential break-ins.John Draper (Cap'n Crunch)
Cap'n Crunch figured out how to make free phone calls using a plastic prize whistle he found in a cereal box. Cap'n Crunch introduced generations of hackers to the glorious concept of phone "phreaking."
(Oscar Meyer weiner whistles also briefly gained a following among phone phreakers.) Honorably discharged from the U.S. Air Force in 1968 after a stint in Vietnam. John Draper has set up his own security firm. He also recently developed Crunchbox, a firewall system that halts the spread of computer viruses.
Linus Torvalds
Father of Linux is a good hacker of all time.
A true hacker in the classic sense, Linus Torvalds was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki when he wrote the operating system Linux (a contraction of "Linus' Minix") in 1991. The software has proven to be tremendously popular worldwide -- and best of all it's FREE!
Torvalds modestly attributes much of Linux's success to the Net and to Richard Stallman's GNU: Both have facilitated development of his original kernel by fostering collaboration among software programmers and developers.
He's humble, he's brilliant, he gave us all access to Unix -- no wonder Linus Torvalds received more votes than any other nominee.
Douglas Engelbart
Don't know why we missed him the first time out: Among other inventions, Dr. Engelbart is responsible for hypertext, windows, cross-file editing and the mouse. There would be no Net hacking without him. Engelbart first thought of hypermedia while serving as a radar technician during World War II. Seeing information displayed on a radar screen, he imagined sitting in front of a similar display, "flying around" in an information space. The engineer pursued his wild ideas in his own lab at the Stanford Research Institute, and first demonstrated his hypermedia "oNLine System" (or NLS) and computer mouse to a stunned audience in 1968.
Holder of more than 20 patents, Engelbart is founder and director of the Bootstrap Institute, specializing in strategies, technologies and processes for building high-performance organizations, teams and individuals.
He also likes to make up science-fiction stories for children.
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Jonathan Cowden