A Tribute to The 10 Most Infamous Student Hackers of All Time
Since last two years, we the VOGH team has been covering all the latest cyber security updates. But today lets do some thing different. One of our frequent reader and fan Katina Solomon has requested us to share a fantastic article. Everyday VOGH draws headlines of hackers around the world and their activities. While trying to maintain speed with time, we usually forgot our past. Today we will take you into the past, where we will discuss about those heroes, who are always been ill treated by the society & the system while revamping those heroes into cyber-criminals or infamous hackers. Its our question to our humanity "Did the system has done justice with them??"
Hacking has always been inherently a young person’s game. The first usage of the word “hacker” was to describe pranksters meddling with the phones at MIT. Many hackers have cited boredom, a desire for change, or the thrill of going somewhere one is not supposed to go as their motivation for hacking, all of which could apply to scores of common activities on college campuses. While today’s hacking scene is dominated by large hacking groups like Anonymous and Masters of Deception, many of the greatest hacks ever have been pulled off by college, high school, and even middle school kids who rose to infamy armed only with a computer and the willingness to cross the bounds of legality.
- Sven Jaschan:
In the words of one tech expert,
“His name will always be associated with some of the biggest viruses in
the history of the Internet.” The viruses: the Sasser and NetSky worms
that infected millions of computers and have caused millions of dollars
of damage since their release in 2004. The man behind the viruses proved
to be not even a man at all, legally. Seventeen-year-old hacker Sven
Jaschan, a student at a computer science school in Germany, claimed to
have created the viruses to become a hero by developing a program that
would eradicate the rampaging Mydoom and Bagle bugs. Instead he found
himself the subject of a $250,000 bounty courtesy of Microsoft, for which some of his classmates turned him in.
- Jonathan James:
In 2000, at the age of 16, James, or “C0mrade” as he was known in
the hacker community, infamously became the first juvenile federally
sentenced for hacking. The targets of his notorious hack jobs were a
wing of the U.S. Department of Defense called the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency, NASA, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Ala. (By hacking the latter James gained the ability to
control the A/C in the International Space Station.) All of these were
pulled off “for fun” while James was still a student at Palmetto Senior
High in Miami. Unfortunately, the fun ran out when James was tied into a
massive identity theft investigation. Though insisting he was innocent, James took his own life, saying he had “no faith in the justice system.”
- Michael Calce:
Yahoo. CNN. Ebay. Amazon. Dell.com. One by one in a matter of days,
these huge websites crashed at the hands of 15-year-old Canadian high
school student Michael Calce, aka “MafiaBoy.” Armed with a
denial-of-service program he called “Rivolta” that overloaded servers he
targeted, the young hacker wreaked $7.5 million in damages, according to court filings.
Calce was caught when he fell victim to a common ailment of teenage
boys: bragging. The cops were turned on to him when he began boasting in
chat rooms about being responsible for the attacks. On Sept. 12, 2001,
MafiaBoy was sentenced to a group facility for eight months on 56 counts
of cybercrime.
- Kevin Mitnick:
Before performing hacks that prompted the U.S. Department of Justice
to declare him “the most wanted computer criminal in United States
history,” Kevin Mitnick had already made a name for himself as a hacker
in his school days, first at Monroe High School in LA and later at USC.
On a dare, Mitnick connived an opening into the computer system of
Digital Equipment Corporation, which some fellow hackers then used to steal proprietary source code
from the company before ratting on him. While still on probation for
that crime, Mitnick broke into the premises of Pacific Bell and had to
go on the run from police in the aftermath, during which time he hacked
dozens of systems, including those of IBM, Nokia, Motorola, and Fujitsu.
- Tim Berners-Lee:
“Scandalous” is a synonym for “infamous,” and for this legendary
computer scientist, knight of the British Empire, and inventor of the
World Wide Web to have been a hacker in his school days is certainly a
juicy factoid. During his time at Oxford in the mid-’70s, Sir Tim was
banned from using university computers after he and a friend were caught
hacking their way into restricted digital areas. Luckily by that time
he already knew how to make his own computer out of a soldering iron, an old TV, and some spare parts. And also luckily for him, he will always be revered as the father of the Internet.
- Neal Patrick and the 414s:
In the early ’80s, hacking was still a relatively foreign concept to
most Americans. Few recognized the enormous power hackers could hijack
with a few strokes on a keyboard, which explains why a young group of
hackers known as the 414s (after a Milwaukee area code) were virtual
celebrities after they hacked into the famous Los Alamos National
Laboratory, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and elsewhere.
While today hacking a lab where classified nuclear research is conducted
could earn you a one-way ticket to Guantanamo, the 17-year-old
ringleader and high school student Neal Patrick was on the cover of Newsweek. The group members got light sentences but prompted Congress to take a stronger role in cybercrime.
- Robert T. Morris:
The first ever Internet worm, the Morris Worm derived its name from
Cornell grad student Robert Tappan Morris. In 1988, Morris released the
worm through MIT’s system to cover his tracks, which would seem to
contradict his claims that he meant no harm with it. But that’s exactly
what resulted: the worm spread out of control, infecting more than 6,000
computers connected to the ARPANET, the academic forerunner to the
World Wide Web. The damages reached as high as an estimated $10 million,
and Morris earned the ignominious distinction of being the first person
prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Morris got community
service but was apparently not considered too infamous to be offered
his current job as a professor at MIT.
- George Hotz:
To some, George Hotz (aka “geohot,” aka “million75,” aka “mil”) is a
public menace, a threat to electronic businesses everywhere. To many,
Hotz is a hero. The high-schooler shot to fame/infamy in 2007 at the
tender age of 17 by giving the world its first hacked, or “jailbroken”
iPhone. He traded it for a new sports car and three new iPhones, and the
video of the hacking received millions of hits. Apple has had to
grudgingly come to terms with jailbreaking, seeing as the courts have declared it legal,
but Sony Corp. is definitely not OK with such tampering. When Hotz
hacked his PlayStation 3 and published the how-to on the web, the
company launched a vicious lawsuit against him. In turn, the hacker
group Anonymous launched an attack on Sony, stealing millions of users’
personal info.
- Donncha O’Cearbhaill:
According to the FBI, this 19-year-old freshman at Trinity College
Dublin is one of the top five most wanted hackers in the world. Well, he
was; now that he’s been arrested he’s not really “wanted” anymore. The
Feds contend the young man is a VIP member of the Anonymous and LulzSec
hacking groups that have already been mentioned and whose targets have
included the FBI, the U.S. Senate, and Sony (in the Hotz backlash). It
seems “Palladium” (O’Cearbhaill) took the liberty of listening in on a
conference call between the FBI and several international police forces
who were discussing their investigations of the hacking groups. He could
be sentenced to up to 15 years in prison if convicted for that hack
alone.
- Nicholas Allegra:
Just as George Hotz moved on from the Apple hacking game, Brown
University student Nicholas Allegra is also hanging up his jersey.
“Comex,” as he is known to millions of rooted iPhone fans, created the
simple-to-use Apple iOS jailbreaking program JailbreakMe in 2007 and has since released two newer versions of it. However, Comex seems to have gone over to the dark side, accepting an internship
with the very company whose products he became famous exploiting.
Still, Allegra’s hacking skills are so advanced (one author puts him
five years ahead of the authors of the infamous Stuxnet worm that
corrupted Iran’s nuclear facilities) and so many people availed
themselves of his talents, he will forever live in hacking infamy.
We want to dedicate the above post to the legendary hacker, who left us -Jonathan James aka “C0mrade”. Also the post is a tribute to all the so called 'infamous hackers'. You are our heroes and inspiration, you will always be there in our soul. Team VOGH salutes you......
-Thank you Katina & Online Degrees
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