0. Kevin Mitnick
1. Vladimir Levin
Vladimir Leonidovitch Levin is a Russian Hacker of genius proportions. In 1994 while working with a dialup connection and a laptop from Saint Petersburg, Apartment he accessed the accounts of several large corporate customers of Citibank stealing USD 10.7 million. He ended up spending three years in jail. However, in 2005 an anonymous hacker group came claiming that they were the ones truly responsible for the theft and that they only sold Vladimir the data needed to steal the money.
2. Mathew Bevan and Richard Pryce
In 1996, Mathew Bevan and Richard Pierce were 21 and 17 respectively, when they broke into military computers. They didn’t only hack into US military computers, but the officials thought they might have also hacked into North Korean Systems as well. These people have the unique distinction of saying that they almost started a war.
3. Michael Calce a.k.a MafiaBoy
Michael Calce, a Canadian Hacker was responsible for a series of high profile cyber attacks in 2000. Project Rivolta a project name he called it meaning riot in Italian was a distributed denial of service attack that took down major websites Yahoo, FIFA, Amazon, eBay, CNN, and Dell among others. He was caught after bragging about the attacks in an IRC chat room for which he got eight months in jail. Why such a short sentence? Michael was only in high school at the time.
4. Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo is best-known for hacking into major cooperation’s like Yahoo, Bank of America, Citigroup, The New York Times and Microsoft but the way he did it made him famous. He used public internet connections like libraries and coffee shops to hack to hack into major sites. Because of that style he was named as ‘Homeless Hacker’. In 2004 after being caught he was given six months house arrest in order to pay $65,000 in restitution.
5. Jeanson James Ancheta
Jeanson James Ancheta has been first hacker ever to create a botnet a group hijacked computers that work together for a legal means. In 2004 he started to work with botnets rxbot, a computer worm that can spread his net of infected computers which gave him control to 500,000 computers including US military computers. He was forced to give up his BMW, pay more than $58,000 and serve 60 months in prison.
6. Gary Mckinnon
Gary Mckinnon a.ka Solo is a Scottish hacker who masterminded the largest military computer hack of all time. He hacked into 97 US armed forces and NASA computers between 2001 and 2002within a period of just 24 hours he deleted critical files including weapon logs. In total the damage that his hacking cost, cost the government an estimated $ 700,000.
7. Owen Walker
Owen Walker a.ka AKILL was only 17 when he let in an international hacking group that cause over 26 million dollars in damages. The high school teenager was responsible for creating the Bot virus which spread into 1.3 million computers around the world crashing them. Even though he was caught, despite all the damage, he was released without being convicted.
8. Astra
The hacker named Astra, whose real name was never revealed was a 58 year old Greek Mathematician. He operated between 2002 and 2008. During that five year period he stole weapon technology data in 3D modeling software from a company called the Salt Group, which he sold up to USD 361 million to buyers all around the world. He was tracked down in an apartment in Athens, Greece.
9. Albert Gonzalez
Albert Gonzalez, over a two year period he stole a total of 175 million credit card numbers selling them online. A massive yet undisclosed amount of money was stolen from his victims through identity theft, leaving them to battle to restore the credit ratings and get their money back. He was sentenced to 40 years jail.
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