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- Syntaxis, on 10/10/2007, -4/+140This should be called: "The best and caught top 5 black hat crackers of all time" - the really good hackers don't get caught.
- nymphetamine, on 10/10/2007, -5/+105I bet those guys get a TON of pussy.
- h0merg0mez, on 10/10/2007, -0/+84"Additionally, he was sentenced to six months home confinement..."
Yeah, like he was going anywhere anyway. - frenchdiggler, on 10/10/2007, -2/+53What about ZeroCool?
- doctechnical, on 10/10/2007, -0/+31No Captain Crunch?
Hrrrm. - miztaken, on 10/10/2007, -0/+29Dude, you don't belong on Digg.
- fantasticFlan, on 10/10/2007, -0/+27The names of all fifty states is in no way news, unless they changed without warning.
- Alexx3k, on 10/10/2007, -1/+27Full Text since mirror is running slow:
1. Kevin Mitnick.
Mitnick is perhaps synonymous with Hacker. The Department of Justice still refers to him as "the most wanted computer criminal in United States history." His accomplishments were memorialized into two Hollywood movies: Takedown and Freedom Downtime.
Mitnick got his start by exploiting the Los Angeles bus punch card system and getting free rides. Then similar to Steve Wozniak, of Apple, Mitnick tried Phone Phreaking. Mitnick was first convicted for hacking into the Digital Equipment Corporation's computer network and stealing software.
Mitnick then embarked on a two and a half year coast to coast hacking spree. He has stated that he hacked into computers, scrambled phone networks, stole corporate secrets and hacked into the national defense warning system. His fall came when he hacked into fellow computer expert and hacker Tsutomu Shimomura's home computer.
Mitnick is now a productive member of society. After serving 5 years and 8 months in solitary confinement, he is now a computer security author, consultant and speaker.
2. Adrian Lamo
Lamo hit major organizations hard, hacking into Microsoft and The New York Times. Lamo would use Internet connections at coffee shops, Kinko's and libraries to achieve his feats earning him the nickname "The Homeless Hacker". Lamo frequently found security flaws and exploited them. He would often inform the companies of the flaw.
Lamo's hit list includes Yahoo!, Citigroup, Bank of America and Cingular. Of course White Hat Hackers do this legally because they are hired by the company to such, Lamo however was breaking the law.
Lamo's intrusion into The New York Times intranet placed him squarely into the eyes of the top cyber crime offenders. For this crime, Lamo was ordered to pay $65,000 in restitution. Additionally, he was sentenced to six months home confinement and 2 years probation. Probation expired January of 2007. Lamo now is a notable public speaker and award winning journalist.
3. Jonathan James
At 16 years old, James gained enormous notoriety when he was the first minor to be sent to prison for hacking. He later admitted that he was just having fun and looking around and enjoyed the challenge.
James hit high profile organizations including the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is an agency of the Department of the Defense. With this hack he was able to capture usernames and passwords and view highly confidential emails.
High on James list, James also hacked in NASA computers and stole software valued at over $1.7 million. The Justice Department was quoted as saying: "The software stolen by James supported the International Space Station's physical environment, including control of the temperature and humidity within the living space." Upon discovering this hack, NASA had to shut dow its entire computer system costing taxpayers $41,000. Today James aspires to start a computer security company.
4. Robert Tappan Morris
Morris is the son of a former National Security Agency scientist named Robert Morris. Robert is the creator of the Morris worm. This worm was credited as the first computer worm spread through the Internet. Because of his actions, he was the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Morris created the worm while at Cornell as a student claiming that he intended to use the worm to see how large the Internet was at the time. The worm, however, reproduced itself uncontrollably, shutting down many computers until they had completely malfunctioned. Experts claim 6,000 machines were destroyed. Morris was ultimately sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours of community service and assessed a $10,500 fine.
Morris is now a tenured professor at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His focus is computer network architecture.
5. Kevin Poulsen
Frequently referred to as Dark Dante, Poulsen gained national recognition for his hack into Los Angeles radio's KIIS-FM phone lines. These actions earned him a Porsche among many other items.
The FBI began to search for Poulson, when he hacked into the FBI database and federal computers for sensitive wiretap information. Poulsen's specialty was hacking into phone lines and he frequently took over all of a station's phone lines. Poulson also reactivated old Yellow Page escort telephone numbers for a partner who operated a virtual escort agency. Poulson was featured on Unsolved Mysteries and then captured in a supermarket. He was assessed a sentence of five years.
Since his time in prison, Poulsen has worked as a journalist and was promoted to senior editor for Wired News. His most popular article details his work on identifying 744 sex offenders with Myspace profiles. - jamend, on 10/10/2007, -2/+27Innacurate, where's Ramzi?
- sdubois92, on 10/10/2007, -1/+266. Crash Override
7. Acid Burn
8. Lord Nikon - Snakedal337, on 10/10/2007, -4/+29How did Mitnick make this list? He was a social deciver, not so much a hacker, he got his passwords through social engineering, not software holes.
- Enfenestrate, on 10/10/2007, -2/+20It can't be those guys because their names are retarded.
- bmatherlyjr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+17My personal list:
5. Vladimir Levin - Famous mathematician who was the mastermind behind the Russian
hacker gang that cheated Citibank computers into giving out
approximately ten million dollars.
4. Robert Morris - The grandfather of the Internet worm.
3. Jonathan James - The first child to be sent to prison for hacking.
2. Gary McKinnon - British hacker responsible for the biggest US military hack of
all times.
and FTW and my personal favorite:
1. Ron Harris - Gaming official from Nevada who used his programming skills
to completely re-write the firmware that slot machines used
to milk over $100,000 from casinos, what made this hacker
unique was that his firmware went completely undetected
because when the tool used to check the slot machines the
software registered as legit. Truly genius! - Ghengis, on 10/10/2007, -8/+24Again... you mean "crackers" not "hackers". The really good HACKERS are the people like Eric Raymond, not criminal CRACKERS.
- Louis11, on 10/10/2007, -2/+17... and how is Lamo a black hat? It says so right in the article: "Lamo frequently found security flaws and exploited them. He would often inform the companies of the flaw."
- jmpeagle, on 10/10/2007, -1/+15or CrashOverride and Acid Burn? Best movie ever.
- shakin, on 10/10/2007, -2/+16In the good ol' days the term hacker was used for both so-called white hat and black hat hackers. A cracker is someone who cracks the copy protection on software.
- motang, on 10/10/2007, -2/+16Mirror - http://www.marvquin.com.nyud.net:8090/blog/top-five-5-best-criminal-computer-hackers-all-time
1. Kevin Mitnick
2. Adrian Lamo
3. Jonathan James
4. Robert Tappan Morris
5. Kevin Poulsen - spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -2/+15A cracker is someone who cracks security systems for malicious purposes. A hacker is a great enthusiast of a topic.
- SystemLord, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:c50XJ3HD5tEJ:www.marvquin.com/blog/top-five-5-best-criminal-computer-hackers-all-time+http://www.marvquin.com/blog/top-five-5-best-criminal-computer-hackers-all-time&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca
- ndonohue, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11agreed, grey hat would be a better term, but he did mess around with the New York Times website, which I believe got him his prison sentence
- extratired, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9title should be "top 5 AMERICAN black hat hackers of all time". there are other people on this planet than US citizens!
- fusama, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9crackers meaning criminal hackers is a perfectly valid definition. That said, referring to crackers as hackers isn't so much wrong as not specific, since crackers are a proper subset of hackers.
- prkchpsndwiches, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Yeah. 5 years SOLITARY. No downside.....
- jackwaters, on 10/10/2007, -4/+10WTF....
- bigteebo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5You know, "hacking" isn't a popularity contest, nor a competition. It's none of that. The list is moreso like " who has the most books written about them?". If there was some sort of "best of", they are out of the spotlight so they don't end up behind bars.
- drgmdp, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5isn't that a valid tool for hacking?
- siggyfawn, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7Uh no, he was a hacker.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Aren't the best hackers in the world the ones who don't get caught? Just thought I'd throw that in there.
- sabach, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Now THERE was a pioneer.
- indicas, on 10/10/2007, -4/+8no, it really wasn't. that movie made the hacking community look like a joke.
- spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Morris launched his worm accidentally. They should have put John "Capn Crunch" Draper in his place.
- TroubleInMind, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Captain Crunch wasn't a hacker per se; he was a phreaker - and completely prevented any chance at a lasting legacy by becoming a pathetic wretch who hangs around conventions begging people to remember who he was.
- Battlecry, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Cool movie, but I remember when it came out how pissed off the hacker community was. The Hackers webpage got defaced and the movie company quickly took it down before they realized what great publicity it would be and put it back up.
- BuryIt, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Buried as Inaccurate.
The identities of the real top 5 hackers are unknown. - spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Because flying around some VR FAT city is leeter than using the command line.
- bluetytanium, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Where's that kid from "The Core"?
- Radovan, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4His name is Kevin Poulsen. His name is Kevin Poulsen.
- bitspace, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5You are mistaken, sir. You evidently aren't old enough to remember "the good ol' days". The term "hacker" has been hijacked by the media and the bleating sheep who pay attention to the media. The correct definition of "hacker" was summarised by spyrochaete above. See http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html.
- spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Lamo used the NYT's unlimited subscription to the AP feed or something like that. If they didn't have an unlimited subscription his shenanigans would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but since they did it cost nothing. He then informed the NYT admins of the security hole and told them how to fix it. They busted him and, of course, the cops listed the non-subscription value on his rap sheet.
- krinthekuz, on 09/16/2008, -1/+4the brit getting extradited to the US for finding "extraterrestrial officers" said that when he broke in, there were signs that other hackers were there before him.
i wouldn't be surprised at all. the vast majority of IT personnel is completely dubious, even in high security areas. - marcosc, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3No dates, no digg.
- cricoste90, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4So they all get out of jail and make money by becoming authors, professionals, etc. with a reputation.
Practically no downside; they are not good examples for kids I'll tell you that... - mestefantro, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3now this is leet: http://image.bayimg.com/lafdkaabf.jpg
- spyrochaete, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4He did both. He was inspired to discover social engineering from his experience with magic tricks, and he learned about computer security infiltration in college. He's written two books - one on social engineering and one on software hacking.
- marm0t, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5No, it really was the best movie ever. Hollywood always makes underground communities look like a joke. Bash it all you want for not being true to life, its still a great movie.
- sabach, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2I heard an Art Bell interview with him about 10 years ago. It sounded like he was on a pay phone and he did sound like a freaked-out paranoid.
- keeganspeck, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2They hadn't hired him to do the work. I agree with ndonohue, more like gray (or grey, fer teh brits) hat.
- WildTang3nt, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Ya, looks like someone clone-stamped the picture. I heh'd.
- roalex82, on 10/10/2007, -2/+4U don't know what you're talking about...
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