Kevin Mitnick : Known worldwide as the
“most famous hacker” and for having
been the first to serve a prison sentence
for infiltrating computer systems. He
started dabbling when he was a minor,
using the practice known as phone
phreaking. Although he has never
worked in programming, Mitnick is
totally convinced that you can cause
severe damage with a telephone and
some calls. These days, totally distanced
from his old hobbies and after passing
many years behind bars, he works as a
security consultant for multinational
companies through his company
“Mitnick Security.”
Gary McKinnon : This 41-year-old
Scotsman, also known as Solo, is the
perpetrator of what’s considered the
biggest hack in the history of computer
science – into a military system. Not
satisfied with this, in the years 2001 and
2002, he made a mockery of the
information security of NASA itself and
the Pentagon. Currently he is at liberty
awarding his extradition to the U.S. and
prohibited access to a computer with
Internet connection.
Vladimir Levin: This Russian biochemist
and mathematician was accused of
having committed one of the biggest
bank robberies of all times by means of
the cracking technique. From Saint
Petersburg, Levin managed to transfer
funds estimated at approximately 10
million dollars from Citibank in New
York to accounts he had opened in
distant parts of the world. He was
arrested by INTERPOL in 1995 at
Heathrow airport (England). Although he
managed to rob more than 10 million
dollars, he was only sentenced to three
years in prison. Currently he is free.
Kevin Poulsen : Today he may be a
journalist and collaborates with
authorities to track paedophiles on the
Internet, but Poulsen has a dark past as
a cracker and phreaker. The event that
brought him the most notoriety was
taking over Los Angeles phone lines in
1990. A radio station was offering a
Porsche as a prize for whoever managed
to be caller number 102. It goes without
saying that Poulsen was the winner of
the contest.
Timothy Lloyd:In 1996, information
services company Omega, provider of
NASA and the United States Navy,
suffered losses of around 10 million
dollars. And it was none other than Tim
Lloyd, an x-employee fired some weeks
earlier, who was the cause of this
financial disaster. Lloyd left a virtually
activated information bomb in the
company’s codes, which finally
detonated July 31 of that same year.
Robert Morris : Son of one of the
forerunners in the creation of the virus,
in 1988 Morris managed to infect no
fewer than 6,000 computers connected
to the ArpaNet network (one of the
precursors to the internet) He did it from
the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) and for his criminal
activities he earned a four year prison
sentence, which was finally reduced to
community service.
David Smith: Not all hackers can boast of
creating the virus that spread the fastest
to computers the width and breadth of
the globe – David Smith can. In 1999, the
father of the Melissa virus managed to
infect and crash 100,000 email accounts
with his malicious creation. Smith, who
was thirty years old at the time, was
sentenced and freed on bail.
MafiaBoy: In February of 2000, many of
the most important online companies in
the US, such as eBay, Yahoo and
Amazon, suffered a technical glitch
called Denial of Service, which caused a
total of 1700 million dollars in losses.
But did these sites know that the
perpetrator of the attack was a 16 year-
old Canadian who responded to the alias
MafiaBoy? Surely not, although it didn’t
take them long to find out, thanks to his
bragging about his bad deed to his
classmates at school.
