Ḥackərṣ ṭḥaṭ
ṣḥōōk ṭḥə ʷōrłḍ
Srinidhi Ravi
Asian School of Cyber Laws
To download great stuff and win lots of goodies, visit:
www.facebook.com/republic.of.cyberia
Hackers that shook
the world !
Srinidhi Ravi
Asian School of Cyber Laws
1|Page
If you are good hacker everyone knows your name,
if you are a great hacker no one knows who you are.
2|Page
Published in 2012 by Asian School of Cyber Laws. Copyright ©
2012 by Asian School of Cyber Laws. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or otherwise used
without prior written permission from the author unless such
use is expressly permitted by applicable law. No investigation
has been made of common-law trademark rights in any word.
Words that are known to have current trademark registrations
are shown with an initial capital and are also identified as
trademarks.
The inclusion or exclusion of any word, or its capitalization, in
this book is not, however, an expression of the publisher's
opinion as to whether or not it is subject to proprietary rights,
nor is it to be regarded as affecting the validity of any
trademark.
This book is provided "as is" and Asian School of Cyber Laws
makes no representations or warranties, express or implied
either in respect of this book or the software, websites and
other information referred to in this book.
By way of example, but not limitation, Asian School of Cyber
Laws makes no representations or warranties of
merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose or that
the use of licensed software, database or documentation will
not infringe any third party patents, copyrights, trademarks or
other rights.
3|Page
The chosen case scenarios are for instructional purposes
only and any association to an actual case and litigation is
purely coincidental. Names and locations presented in the
case scenarios are fictitious and are not intended to reflect
actual people or places.
Reference herein to any specific commercial products,
processes, or services by trade name, trademark,
manufacturer, or otherwise does not constitute or imply its
endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by Asian School
of Cyber Laws, and the information and statements shall
not be used for the purposes of advertising.
Printed in India
4|Page
Contents
people
0.
Introduction ......................................................................................8
1. Adrian Lamo ....................................................................................... 14
10. Albert Gonzalez ............................................................................... 17
11. Alvi brothers ..................................................................................... 20
100. Chad Davis ...................................................................................... 22
101. Chen Ing-hau.................................................................................. 24
110. Clifford Stoll ................................................................................... 27
111. David Smith .................................................................................... 30
1000. Dennis Moran .............................................................................. 32
1001. Dmitry Sklyarov ......................................................................... 34
1010. Ehud Tenenbaum....................................................................... 37
1011. Frederick Cohen ......................................................................... 39
1100. Gary McKinnon ........................................................................... 41
1101. Jan de Wit ..................................................................................... 44
1110. Joanna Rutkowska .................................................................... 46
1111. John Draper ................................................................................. 49
10000. John Schiefer ............................................................................. 52
5|Page
10001. Jon Lech Johansen ................................................................... 54
10010. Jonathan Joseph James .......................................................... 56
10011. Jeanson James Ancheta ......................................................... 60
10100. Jeffrey Lee Parson ................................................................... 62
10101. Jerome Heckenkamp .............................................................. 64
10110. Kevin Mitnick ............................................................................ 66
10111. Kevin Poulsen ........................................................................... 69
11000. Kristina Vladimirovna Svechinskaya ............................... 72
11001. Mark Abene ............................................................................... 75
11010. Michael Calce ............................................................................ 77
11011. Nahshon Even-Chaim ............................................................ 79
11100. Onel A. de Guzman .................................................................. 82
11101. Pieter Zatko ............................................................................... 85
11110. Raphael Gray ............................................................................ 87
11111. Richard Jones ............................................................................ 89
100000. Robert Tappan Morris ........................................................ 91
100001. Susan Headley ........................................................................ 94
100010. Vladimir Levin ....................................................................... 97
6|Page
groups
1. ANONYMOUS ................................................................................... 101
10. CHAOS COMPUTER CLUB ......................................................... 111
11. CULT OF THE DEAD COW ......................................................... 114
100. DIGITAL DAWGPOUND ........................................................... 117
101. GENOCIDE2600 ......................................................................... 118
110. GLOBALHELL .............................................................................. 120
111. GOATSE SECURITY ................................................................... 121
1000. HACKER DOJO .......................................................................... 123
1001. HACKWEISER ........................................................................... 125
1010. HARFORD HACKERSPACE ................................................... 127
1011. HELITH ....................................................................................... 129
1100. HONKER UNION ...................................................................... 131
1101. IPHONE DEV TEAM ............................................................... 133
1110. L0PHT ......................................................................................... 134
1111. LULZRAFT ................................................................................. 136
10000. LULZSEC .................................................................................. 138
10001. MASTERS OF DECEPTION................................................. 141
10010. MILW0RM ............................................................................... 142
10011. NETWORK CRACK PROGRAM HACKER GROUP ........ 144
10100. PHONE LOSERS OF AMERICA .......................................... 146
7|Page
ZERO
0. Introduction
The term hacker is very generic. It usually means someone
who “bends” or “breaks” the security system in a computer
or network. This could be for fun, for learning, for proving a
point, making a statement or even for profit.
It may refer to a person looking for loopholes in the system
to improve computer security; it may be a bunch of smart
kids doing it to make money; or just a computer geek who
wants to find a way of making a computer application do
something it was not designed to do. In the words of Paul
Graham:
To the popular press, "hacker" means someone
who
breaks
into
computers.
Among
programmers it means a good programmer. But
the two meanings are connected. To
programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the
most literal sense: someone who can make a
8|Page
computer do what he wants—whether the
computer wants to or not.
To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has
two senses. It can be either a compliment or an
insult. It's called a hack when you do something
in an ugly way. But when you do something so
clever that you somehow beat the system, that's
also called a hack. The word is used more often in
the former than the latter sense, probably
because ugly solutions are more common than
brilliant ones.
Nowadays, the term cracker is frequently used to denote a
hacker with criminal intentions. A group of hackers
working together would form a community e.g. Anonymous.
As you read the book, you will also realize that most hackers
have handles, which are considered to be “cooler” than
their legal names. A handle also helps them to hide their
identity from the police. Handles also make it difficult to
guess the hacker’s race and gender. E.g. Shrinidhi is
obviously a south Indian girl, but who is Ace?
Hacker’s are conventionally divided into a few categories
such as:
Neophytes, or n00bs or newbies are beginners with
virtually no “hacking experience".
9|Page
Script Kiddies are amateurs or point-and-click
hackers who use ready-made hacking software and
scripts to break into very vulnerable systems.
White Hat Hacker: A person who aims at improving
the security of his organization’s systems is a White
Hat Hacker. Technically, this is “ethical hacking”
done with no malicious reasons. Also known as
“computer security experts”, white hats perform
penetration tests on corporate and Government
networks to improve system security.
Black Hat Hacker: A Black Hat illegally “breaks”
into computer systems and networks to steal critical
information, cause damage or make money.
Grey Hat Hacker: A Grey Hat first “hacks” into
computer systems and networks of organizations
and then informs the targets about their poor
security. The grey hat then offers to fix the
vulnerabilities for a fee.
Hackitivists use hacking as a means of political
protest. Their favorite methods include denial of
service and web defacement attacks.
Blue hat hackers test new applications for
vulnerabilities before the application is publically
released.
10 | P a g e
Nation state hackers are those that work for or on
behalf of intelligence agencies of countries.
Organized hacker gangs carry out various cyber
crimes for profit.
Bots are automated software programs that are
used for hacking. These may even be powered with
artificial intelligence capabilities.
Any discussion on hackers and hacking is incomplete
without the hacker’s manifesto:
The Hacker Manifesto
by +++The Mentor+++
Written January 8, 1986
Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.
"Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal", "Hacker
Arrested after Bank Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's
technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?
Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped
him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world...
11 | P a g e
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than
most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers
explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I
understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in
my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second,
this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's
because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or
feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't
like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing
through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins,
an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day
incompetencies is sought... a board is found. "This is it... this is
where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if I've never met
them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again...
I know you all...
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike...
12 | P a g e
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby
food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat
that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.
The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils,
but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the
switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service
already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap
if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us
criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without
skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and
you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars,
you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's
for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what
they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something
that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this
individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
13 | P a g e
ONE
1. Adrian Lamo
Adrian was one of the hackers who broke into computers
for good reasons being a threat analyst by profession. The
Columbian- American hacker strangely never resided in one
place to perform his hacking. He often did a lot of his work
from cyber cafes, university libraries and abandoned
buildings.
Adrian first got famous when between 2002 and 2003; he
hacked into the systems of several large companies like
Microsoft, Yahoo!. The grey hat hacker in fact added his
name to the internal database of expert sources after
breaking into the systems of The New York times. However,
after he hacked into such high profile networks, he also
explained why and how he did it. And the best part - even
when the system access was authorized from his end, he
would find security loopholes in their systems for free. This
led to his arrest in 2003.
14 | P a g e
15 | P a g e
In 2004, an interview with Wired revealed that Lamo’s
girlfriend accused him of using a stun gun on her, for which
the court issued a restraining order against the hacker.
Lamo surrendered himself to the U.S Marshals and the FBI
after several weeks in hiding. He was also required to pay
$65,000 for the damages he had caused and sentenced to six
months house arrest.
Lamo served two years probation and is now employed as a
tech journalist.
16 | P a g e
TWO
10. Albert Gonzalez
Albert committed the biggest bank theft so far between
2005 and 2007. He with a group of other hackers used SQL
injections to create back doors on a large number of
corporate systems and installed ARP spoofing softwares to
retrieve sensitive information from them; later reselling
over 170 million card numbers.
In high school, Albert and his friend hacked into the Indian
government’s computer systems through library computers
and dropped a mail about their culture. After the incident,
the hacker was warned to stay away from computers for a
few months. In 2000, Albert moved to Kearny, New Jersey.
There he joined a hacker group named Shadowcrew.
Apart from credit card theft, the hacker has also been
accused of innumerable objects of identity theft like birth
certificates, driver’s license, college identity cards, etc.
17 | P a g e
18 | P a g e
A member of the group sold personal information regarding
$18 million email accounts and accomplices who sold
forbidden items were indicted.
Gonzalez was also involved in hacking the TJX companies
and the mastermind behind stealing millions of credit card
and debit card details. In 2010, he was sentenced to twenty
years in federal prison.
19 | P a g e
THREE
11. Alvi brothers
The Brain was the first computer virus accidentally created
by two Pakistani brothers Basit and Amjad in September
1986. The brothers worked at a hospital and created the
virus for the sole purpose of preventing others from
copyrighting their medical software.
20 | P a g e
The virus only had the capability to damage MS-DOS.
The Brain virus affected the IBM Personal computers. It
would replace the boot sector of the floppy disc with five
kilobytes of the virus. The real boot sector is shifted to
another section in the hard disk.
The virus came with a message that said
“Welcome to the Dungeon © 1986 Brain & Amjads (pvt)
LtdVIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic
memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us
today - Thanks GOODNESS!! BEWAREOF THE er..VIRUS: this
program is catching program follows after these
messages....$#@%$@!!”
The virus also contained contact details and address of the
creator of the virus and mentioned that in order to cure the
infected system, the victims would have to call the authors
back. They tried to convince frustrated victims from
different parts of the country that they had no evil
intentions while creating the virus. Later when the code ran
amok, they had no choice but to cut their telephone lines.
The brothers are currently working in Pakistan as Internet
Service providers for an organization named the Brain
Telecommunication Limited.
21 | P a g e
FOUR
100. Chad Davis
Davis, popularly known as Mindphasr was a hacker of the
late 20th century. He formed a ring of about 60 hackers by
the name of GlobalHell. Davis has been accused of
participating in high profile attacks such as web
defacements and hacking into websites of government and
corporate agencies.
The members of this group also broke into websites of the
US army, US cellular, US postal service and that of the White
House. They then tapped illegally tapped teleconferences
and stole critical information.
The FBI tried to track down the members of Globalhell on
June 2nd 1999 after they destroyed the systems of the White
House. On June 28th, he deliberately hacked into the systems
f the US army after the previous investigation, posting a
message saying “globalHell will not die”. This incident
forced the FBI and the Computer Crime Resident Agency of
22 | P a g e
the Army's Criminal Investigation Command to handle the
case.
On March 1st 2000, David was sentenced to six months
imprisonment, ordered to pay US$8,054 followed by three
years probation.
The American hacker, post-conviction works as an
independent security consultant. Davis has also been invited
to give speeches in different parts of the country on network
security and its importance.
23 | P a g e
FIVE
101. Chen Ing-hau
Chen ing-hau is the author of the deadly Chernobyl virus. It
was a file virus that was first discovered on the 25th of June
1998. CIH gets its name from the initials of its creator and
came with an .exe file extension.
The nature of the virus was such that when executed on a
computer system, it would turn into a resident and infect
every executable file. CIH would look out for empty spaces
in a file, split itself into smaller pieces and occupy the blank
spaces by inserting its own code. Due to this ability of the
virus, the file size never increased. Hence, the virus is also
called “Spacefiller”.
The Chernobyl virus has the capability to run only on
Windows 95, 98 and ME systems. The virus has two
payloads. The first payload fills up the hard drive by
overwriting random data from the 0th sector of the disk.
24 | P a g e
25 | P a g e
This went on using an infinite loop till the system crashed.
This made it impossible to recover information from the
system.
On the other hand, the second payload caused permanent
damage to the computer by writing to the Flash BIOS and
corrupting the information stored there. This resulted in a
blank screen display when a user turned on the system.
The virus first spread in 1998 summer through pirated
software. Within a year, multiple software companies
unintentionally released the virus. IBM manufactured PCs
pre-installed with the virus in 1999. Hundreds of computers
in Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and about ten companies in
India were infected with the virus resulting in about
$250,000,000 worth of damages.
The Taiwanese hacker was initially arrested and released
shortly after as no official complaint was filed against him.
26 | P a g e
SIX
110. Clifford Stoll
Clifford Stoll is not a typical hacker. He is mainly an
astronomer and author from Buffalo, New York. Stoll was
employed at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL)
in California, a Computer Center, where he had to track an
accounting error in the LBL system.
While working as the system administrator, Stoll once
mentioned that the system had been hacked and the root
password had been accessed.
Naturally, the system security was more important than an
accounting error. Clifford was also able to trace and identify
how the hacker accessed the computer. The LBL also sealed
off the system but in resulted in a futile attempt to protect
the systems.
In the end, they set up a honeypot to track down the
criminal.
27 | P a g e
28 | P a g e
A honeypot is a tactic that seems like very useful
information to the hacker and is also a trap set to catch an
intruder.
He ultimately discovered hacker Markus Hess, after which
Stoll rose to fame for having solved one of the first few cases
relating to digital forensics. The brainy author penned down
details of his investigation in the book “The Cuckoo's Egg:
Tracking a Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage”
and in a paper "Stalking the Wily Hacker".
29 | P a g e
SEVEN
111. David Smith
30 | P a g e
Before we discuss the next hacker, it’s important to know
about the Melissa Virus. Melissa is a macro virus that
replicated itself rapidly.
It spreads via email attachment that does not destroy files
but cause the virus to be sent to the first 50 contacts in the
Microsoft Outlook address book . The virus also crippled
several safeguards in Word 97 and Word 2000.
David Smith was the creator of the infamous Melissa virus.
David belonged to the United States of America and
apparently named his virus after a stripper in Florida.
The virus spread in the form of a suspicious chain letter
with a file that originated on the internet as alt.sex
Newsgroup and comprised of a list of passwords of websites
that required memberships.
On March 26th 1999, Microsoft was forced to shut their
incoming emails due to the virus. It also affected Intel and a
few other companies.
Smith was arrested and then later sentenced to jail on May
1st 2002 for having caused $80million worth of damage.
He spent over one year and eight months in prison, paid a
$5000 fine and did hours of community service for
intentionally sending a virus to cause damage.
31 | P a g e
EIGHT
1000. Dennis Moran
32 | P a g e
The American, popularly known as Coolio, was initially
accused of denial of service attacks on Yahoo!, ebay and
other common websites on the net.
The message sent by the network administrator to CERT
regarding the smurf attack stated that the attacks were
planned and committed by experienced hackers. This
incapacitated the website for several hours. Later it was
found that Moran was not responsible for the attacks.
The hacker was again accused of launching a chain of denial
of service attacks in February 2000 when he defaced
national websites owned by the Army, Los Angeles Anti
Drug organization and that of the Air Force.
A month later, the FBI investigated the case and confiscated
the hacker’s computers. They found evidence of suspicious
activities. However, Moran was not charged with any crime.
With time, the FBI thoroughly checked evidences relating to
other defaced websites and Moran was convicted of 4
counts of Class A violation of unauthorized access. The
hacker was also fined with US $15,000.
33 | P a g e
NINE
1001. Dmitry Sklyarov
Drimtry was working in a software company named
ElcomSoft
while
simultaneously
researching
on
cryptanalysis as a part of his PhD.
At that time, he developed the Advanced E-Book Processor
(AEBR) which made it easy for users to avoid the copyright
protections in Adobe systems e-book reader program. A
complaint from the US Company, Adobe Systems was filed
against him on 16th July 2001.
Although the Russian programmer was charged with
violating copyrights, technically he had done nothing illegal
in his jurisdiction as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
does not apply in Russia.
Hence, several websites initiated protests against his arrest
with slogans like “Free Drimtry” or “Free Sklyarov”.
34 | P a g e
35 | P a g e
In July 2001, Adobe and the Association of American
Publishers came forth with a press release declaring their
support for Drimtry’s arrest.
But Adobe recommended his release after a meeting with
the Electronic Frontier Foundation and decided to hold the
case against the company.
Drimtry was jailed after developing the software but he was
released on 6th August 2001 on a bail worth US $50,000 and
was not allowed to leave his city.
Later, charges against him were dropped and a jury realised
that ElcomSoft had accidentally violated the US Law.
36 | P a g e
TEN
1010. Ehud Tenenbaum
37 | P a g e
This is an Israeli hacker known by the pseudonym The
Analyser. Tenenbaum rose to fame in 1998, when he was
responsible for intruding into systems of several large
websites, a few which were of NASA ,US Air Force, US Navy,
the Pentagon, MIT and many more American and Israeli
universities. He installed a Trojan and softwares to retrieve
information from packets.
At the age of 19, he belonged to a small hacker group and
committed the crime. Before the hacker was sentenced to
imprisonment, he served the Israeli defence forces for a
short term. He was released soon as he was involved in a
traffic accident.
Tenenbaum was penalised for the act and was sentenced to
imprisonment for a year and half. But he served only 8
months. After being released from prison in 2003, he started
his own company “2XS” to provide information security.
In 2008, the hacker again participated in credit card fraud. A
group of hackers broke into financial organizations to steal
credit card numbers which were later sold to other
criminals.
Tenenbaum was charged with Credit card fraud and was
sentenced a two year suspended imprisonment. He also had
to pay a fine worth US$ 18,000.
38 | P a g e
ELEVEN
1011. Frederick Cohen
Fred Cohen was a student at the University of Southern
California School when he invented the first computer virus.
In 1983, the American boy came up with a short program
that infected computers and multiplied itself and distributed
from one computer system to another.
The virus was given the name “parasitic application” due to
its ability to replicate and damage files. The application
immediately took control over the system’s functions. A
Parasitic application could not be easily found as it was
hidden within a bigger program that performed useful
operations and was stored in the floppy disk of a computer.
The computer scientist also wrote a useful program that,
when spread, infected executable files, compressed the size
of files and increased memory space in the system. Since it
did no harm to the system, Cohen also believed that there
are positive viruses. Similarly, he has also done other virus
related researches in the past.
39 | P a g e
Today, Cohen owns a company that offers information
security.
40 | P a g e
TWELVE
1100. Gary McKinnon
41 | P a g e
According to a few websites Gary is the World’s most
dangerous hacker from North London. This was said to be
the “biggest military computer hack of all time” by a
prosecutor. Within a span of one year, the hacker attacked
NASA computers and 97 US military by changing his name
to ‘Solo’.
Between 2001 and 2002, not only did McKinnon hack into
73,000 computers, he also erased important files from the
operating systems, causing about 2000 systems of the US
Military to crash for an entire day. He also sent a message
criticizing their poor security.
The Scottish system administrator has also been accused of
stealing passwords, account files, copying and storing data
on his own computer.
However, the hacker claimed that he did not intend to cause
damage and the reason behind the act was to find
information on extraterrestrial objects to make common
man aware of them. In a BBC interview, he also mentioned
using the Perl script to find blank passwords.
On 19th March 2002, the police confiscated his computer
after an interview with him. Five months later, when
interviewed by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime
Unit (NHTCU), McKinnon was charged with seven counts of
computer crime, each of which required him to be
imprisoned for ten years.
42 | P a g e
Gary was free for five years without restriction until June
2005 and was restricted from using internet. Law states that
if extradited by the US, he could be charged with upto 70
years in jail.
The hacker has also been diagnosed with an autism
spectrum disorder with clinical depression. Currently,
McKinnon is fighting extradition to the United States.
43 | P a g e
THIRTEEN
1101. Jan de Wit
Jan was the creator of the Anna Kournikova virus. This was
a virus very similar to the ILOVEYOU virus except that this
did not corrupt files stored in computers.
It came with a subject titled “Here you have ;0)” and
pretended to have a picture of the famous tennis player
Anna Kournikova where as it actually contained a malicious
file. The file was a visual basic script with the name
“AnnaKournikova.jpg.vbs”
Once opened, the message said “Hi: Check This!” along with
a picture of the tennis player and this triggered the virus to
forward a copy of the mail to the top 50 address from
Microsoft Outlook.
In order to duplicate itself, the worm was built by an
Argentinean programmer “[K]Alamar”, using a Visual Basic
44 | P a g e
worm generator program. It was apparently created within
a few hours.
Jan de Wit was charged with 150 hours of community
service for spreading information into computer networks
with the intention of causing damage and creating the virus
Anna Kournikova on 11th February 2001.
45 | P a g e
FOURTEEN
1110. Joanna Rutkowska
Joanna is a security researcher from Poland. Her area of
specialization is stealth malware and low level security.
Hacking is her interest but her primary focus is on building
security systems to prevent cyber crime.
She started being talked about by people after the Black Hat
briefings Conference in Las Vegas (USA) in August 2006.
Here the lady demonstrated an attack against the security
system of Windows Vista kernel protection mechanism by
dismantling the components and planting a rootkit on the
operating system.
She also introduced Blue pill (a virtual machine rootkit) to
the world that was 100 percent undetectable even on
Windows Vista systems.
46 | P a g e
47 | P a g e
She was published as one of the top “Five Hackers who
made a mark” on 2006 by Eweek magazine. Ever since, the
beautiful woman was often invited to several companies to
talk about their security systems.
In 2006, Rutkowska also pointed out the intrinsic weakness
in Anti-virus softwares, explained the scope of stealth
malware and its threat to the operating systems.
Later in 2007 Joanna with a team member presented
advanced research on virtualization malware. She
established Invisible Things Lab in Warsaw, Poland.
The company focuses on Operating System and Virtual
Machine Manager Security research. In 2010, she and Rafal
Wojtczuk created the Qubes security-centric operating
system based on Disposable Virtual Machine.
48 | P a g e
FIFTEEN
1111. John Draper
John Draper is a very popular name in the computer hacking
world. The American hacker was the king of phone
phreaking in the 1970s. In the absence of the internet,
Draper was also skilled at dealing with phones.
The computer programmer initially joined the Air Force in
1964. John understood the mechanism of getting access to a
local telephone switchboard and facilitated his colleagues
make free calls to their home when in Alaska.
In 1967, he owned a pirate radio station WKOS, but he
eventually closed down when a major radio station WDME
was against him.
Draper was also employed in San Francisco Bay Area where
he did military related work. At that time, he owned his
pirate station and operated it from his Volkswagen van. In
order to give feedback to listeners, he distributed a
telephone number to his audience.
49 | P a g e
50 | P a g e
Draper accidentally entered the world of phone phreaks,
when he was contacted by one of them to build a
multifrequency tone generators for blind people.
In the course of his attempt to build one, he created the ‘blue
box’ which was capable of producing other tones by a phone
company.
Draper was eventually arrested in 1972, when an article
Esquire revealed information about the concept of phone
phreaking. Around the time, he was also noticed by Steve
Wozniak.
He taught Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs the technique of
phone phreaking after which, they set up Apple computers.
While working with them for a short while, he created a
telephone interface board for Apple II and was called the
“Charlie Board”.
But the hacker was sentenced to five years probation.
51 | P a g e
SIXTEEN
10000. John Schiefer
John used the method of wiretapping to access information
and intercept private information.
The hacker used a malware named “spybots” that would
behave as a wiretap on secure computers and steal data that
travelled between the computer and bank accounts. With
the help of this information, John made fraudulent
purchases via Paypal, etc.
Schiefer became well known when he used the same
malware on Microsoft operating systems. It would access
usernames and passwords from a secure place on the hard
drive called ‘PStore’.
He was also the first to use ‘botnets’ to commit identity
theft.
52 | P a g e
Schiefer was hired by a Dutch online advertising Company
to install company software on selected computers for
which he was paid $20,000. But Schiefer and two other
hackers installed the software on a botnet, without the
company owner’s consent.
In all, the hacker was found guilty and in 2009 he was
sentenced to four years for counts of wire fraud, bank fraud,
identity theft and retrieving private information.
53 | P a g e
SEVENTEEN
10001. Jon Lech Johansen
Jon Lech Johansen, commonly known as DVD Jon, was
accused of writing and spreading a software that allows
users to copy protected DVD films.
54 | P a g e
The accusers not only ordered that his computer be
confiscated, but Jon was also required to pay a fine of $1,400
to the court. He is also well known for his work in reverse
engineering data formats.
Jon is a self trained programmer who dropped out of high
school to concentrate on building the DeCSS software in
1999. Almost every DVD- video disc comes with a Content
Scrambling System (CSS) that encodes the data on the disc.
This system is used in order to license a DVD. The DeCSS
was programmed to decrypt the CSS, thereby allowing the
possibility of the contents to be copied.
The Norwegian programmer only took responsibility for
creating the GUI of the software. He refused to take blame
for writing the decrypting program as a person in Germany
was involved in creating this half of the software.
It was also legal under the Norwegian law to copy DVDs for
personal use. His denial was accepted by the court on 7th
January 2003 and relieved from charges.
55 | P a g e
EIGHTEEN
10010. Jonathan Joseph James
Jonathan James a.k.a c0mrade is a hacker from Miami, USA.
The American hacker penetrated into the computers of
NASA and Defence Department computers. NASA was forced
to shut down its systems for three weeks, resulting in a loss
of $41,000.
James was extremely passionate about computers since the
age of 6. He learnt C and Linux on his own by reading
various books and in middle school he even switched to
Linux from Windows on his personal computer.
He was 15 when he was playing around and committed his
first offence. He was the first juvenile to be imprisoned in
the USA for cyber crime.
James intruded the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama,
and downloaded the environmental control software for the
International Space station.
56 | P a g e
This software contained programming about humidity and
temperature control in living space. James was sentenced to
six months house arrest and probation till the age of
eighteen. Not only was he told to write apology letters to
NASA and Defence Department, he was also not allowed to
use the computers unnecessarily.
But the judge revised her decision and permitted the boy to
serve six months house arrest and probation until the age of
twenty one. But, he later violated the probation when he
was tested positive for drug abuse.
Between August and October 1999, James aimed at
interrupting high-profile organizations like the BellSouth
and Miami-Dade school system.
James created an unauthorized back door in the Defence
Threat Reduction Agency Server that helped him view
sensitive information and important emails. This enabled
him sniff the usernames and passwords of employees.
The computer geek mentioned that the source code was not
worth $1.7 million as it was easily possible to hack into their
systems. He also pointed out that they lack serious
computer security. According to legal experts, James could
have served a minimum of ten years in prison had he been
an adult.
57 | P a g e
58 | P a g e
Much later in 2007, a group of hackers interrupted systems
like TJX, Forever21, Boston Market, Barnes & Noble, Sports
Authority, BJ’s wholesale Club, DSW, OfficeMax, Dave &
Buster's and compromised with customer’s credit card
information.
Although James was not involved in the crime, he turned out
to be friends with a few of the hackers in the group. Hence,
during investigation the police discovered a legally
registered firearm and noted, it signalled he was
considering suicide.
Jonathan was afraid he would be accused of crimes he had
not committed and therefore committed suicide with a selfinflicted gunshot on the 18th of May, 2008.
59 | P a g e
NINETEEN
10011. Jeanson James Ancheta
Jeanson is a computer hijacker. The American boy was a
drop out at school after which he joined a program designed
for improperly behaved students.
He was expected to join the army according to his parents
but while working at a cyber café, Jeanson discovered a
computer worm named “rxbot” that could distribute his
chain of infected computers. He later started working with
botnets in June 2004.
Ancheta, more often called Gobo, was the first to be accused
of controlling thousands of infected computers or botnets.
An Operation: Bot Roast was created by the FBI to trace Bot
herders and other hackers in November 2005. Ancheta
plead guilty to four felony charges that included violation of
United States Code Section 1030, Fraud and Related Activity
in Connection with Computers.
60 | P a g e
The hijacker must serve 60 years in prison, return
US$15,000 to the U.S federal government for infecting
military computers and surrender a 1993 BMW as penalty.
61 | P a g e
TWENTY
10100. Jeffrey Lee Parson
62 | P a g e
Jeffrey is best known for creating the computer worm
Blaster in August 2003. The worm spread only on Windows
XP and Windows 2000. The worm would exploit the buffer
flow and when it infected a computer, it would display a
message:
“System Shutdown:
This system is shutting down. Please save all work in progress
and log off. Any unsaved changes will be lost. This shutdown
was initiated by NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Time before shutdown: hh:mm:ss
Message:
Windows must now restart because the Remote Procedure
Call (RPC) Service terminated unexpectedly.”
The system would then automatically reboot and this
occurred every 60 seconds. This was first noticed on 11th
August 2003. It replicated at a rapid rate within two days.
Jeffrey Lee Parson was arrested for intentionally causing
damage to a secure computer and creating the B-variant of
the computer worm. The American boy served 18 months in
jail in 2005.
63 | P a g e
TWENTY ONE
10101. Jerome Heckenkamp
64 | P a g e
Jerome is an Australian citizen who later moved to
Wisconsin, USA with his family. The boy never attended
school but when was educated at home, he proved to be an
extraordinary kid.
He learnt algebra at the 8 and was admitted to the
University of Wisconsin when he was 14.
Jerome worked as a network engineer at Los Alamos
National Laboratory after graduating in Computer Science.
He
intruded
several
large
websites
like
ebay, Qualcomm, Juniper Networks, E-Trade and more that
caused severe damage worth a lot.
In 1999, the UNIX system administrator of Qualcomm
realised that someone has been able to access their systems
externally.
After tracing the suspect’s IP address, the system
administrators hacked into Heckenkamp's computer to
notice that he has already gained access to the root
passwords of the server.
In 2004, Jerome pled guilty to two felonies. He spent 7
months in prison and was sentenced to time served.
65 | P a g e
TWENTY TWO
10110. Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick is one of the most notorious hackers of his
time. He managed to use the art of social engineering and
coding to get his way.
As a kid, Kevin manipulated his bus driver to get useful
information on how he could by his own punching ticket
punch and travel free of cost in any bus in Los Angeles.
Ever since, Kevin used the art of social engineering to
acquire usernames, sensitive information like passwords,
etc to hack into systems. The first time the American
intruded a computer system was at the age of 16 in 1979.
With the help of a phone number of Ark, which is the
computer system for DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation)
for building the RSTS/E operating system software, he
hacked into DEC’s network to copy the software.
66 | P a g e
67 | P a g e
Hence he was able to overhear conversations by tapping
telephone calls.
Kevin is also accused of breaking into computer networks of
some large organizations like Nokia, Motorola, Sun
Microsystems, Fujitsu Siemens and more. The American
hacker was amused by the power of tapping telephone
conversations to eavesdrop and soon joined a gang of phone
phreaks. In the late 1980s he also dated a lady in the group
named Susan Headley.
In an interview with TIME magazine Kevin mentioned how
he was a mischievous kid right from school days. In a class
assignment, instead of writing a code that gives you the first
100 Fibonacci numbers, he alone wrote a correct program
to steal student’s passwords and impressed his teacher.
Kevin claimed that he was proudest when he hacked into
Pac Bell Cellular to perform traffic analysis on the FBI
agents who were to catch him.
Tsutomu, a Japanese citizen brought up in New Jersey
where he attended Princeton High School and became
famous in no time.
Kevin was then charged with 12 months imprisonment in
1988.
68 | P a g e
TWENTY THREE
10111. Kevin Poulsen
69 | P a g e
Kevin Poulsen a.k.a Dark Dante is an American black hat
hacker. He is best known for hacking phone systems,
particularly at radio stations. While he was working at the
SRI International during the day, he also learnt the
technique of lock picking.
He would indulge in dangerous high- tech stunts that would
subsequently make him one of America’s most known cyber
criminals. He was most recognised in 1990 for hacking into
telephone lines in the Los Angeles Radio Station KIIS FM,
assuring that he would be the 102nd caller, for which he won
a Porsche 944 S2.
While he was put behind bars, Kevin also tasted celebrity
charm in the tech world after the release of his book
‘Watchman: The twisted life and Crimes of a Serial killer’.
Once Poulsen was out of prison, he took up journalism. In
2000 he joined SecurityFocus, a research organization,
where he wrote on security and hacking news. Soon, he
became well- known and his original research work would
often get picked by the mainstream press. He left the
company in 2005 to work as a freelancer and turn into an
independent writer.
In October 2006, Poulsen searched and released
information on sex offenders who would fantasize sex with
children on MySpace. The search listed about 744 sex
offenders who owned a profile on Myspace.
70 | P a g e
The hacker turned journalist received a number of awards
like the Knight-Batten Award for innovation in Journalism in
2008, Webby Award in 2011, and many more. He now
works as a News Editor in Wired.com.
71 | P a g e
TWENTY FOUR
11000. Kristina Vladimirovna Svechinskaya
A Russian by nationality, Kristina is actually a money mule
maker. She used Zeus Trojans to hack into the computers of
several banks and was also charged for using multiple false
passports.
In November 2010, she was arrested for stealing millions of
dollars from various bank accounts in Britain and America.
After Kristina lost her father, her family was living on just
$400 USD. She chose a work and travel program in her third
year and moved to Massachusetts (USA).
Since her earnings were not much, the smart hacker later
moved to New York where she chose to money mule. She
earned the tag of the “world’s sexiest hacker” for her
revealing clothes and casual appearance. Kristina was 21
when she, along with nine other people attacked thousands
of banks.
72 | P a g e
73 | P a g e
They successfully “hacked” at least five of them and took
away $3 million in total.
The hacker was released on a $25,000 bail. But, if declared
guilty, then Svechinskaya may have to serve up to 40 years
in prison.
She has her personal page on VKontatke, A Russian Social
Networking site very similar to Facebook. VKontatke is
available in 5 different Languages and enables users to
share large files using Torrent filesharing technology.
74 | P a g e
TWENTY FIVE
11001. Mark Abene
75 | P a g e
Mark belonged to New York based hacker groups named
Master of Deception and Legion of Doom. He excelled at
hacking telephone companies. The elite hacker was better
known as Phiber Optik among his group.
Ever since Mark was 9, he spent time on computers. He
eventually got curious about hacking and learnt about dialup computers and DEC minicomputers.
He also observed that programming in the DEC
minicomputers were much simpler and user friendly than
his home computers. After this, he chose to learn more
about the complexities of nation-wide telephone network.
Abene was a high profile hacker in the 1980s and early
1990s. He also has vast knowledge in system and network
intrusion and 20 years of professional experience in the
field of information and network security. In February 1991,
he went to prison for 35 months charged with computer
tampering and trespass.
The computer security hacker has also featured in The New
York Times, Harper’s, Time Magazine and many more.
Abene has also been chosen as the keynote speaker by both
hacker and security conferences around the world to make
students aware of Information security and its importance.
76 | P a g e
TWENTY SIX
11010. Michael Calce
Calce was born in Montreal, Quebec. Since childhood,
Michael was very fascinated by computers. After his
parents’ separation, he often felt disconnected with friends
and family.
77 | P a g e
Hence, his father bought a computer just for him. Computers
gave him a sense of control and command. He is commonly
known as “Mafia Boy”.
Mafia boy mainly launched a series of very popular denial of
service attacks in February 2000 and committed identity
theft on the internet. He was the internet identity of Script
kiddie Michael Calce, a high school student from west island,
Canada, who crippled some of the large websites like
Yahoo!, Dell, CNN, ebay etc. The boy was 15 years old when
he made headlines by launching attacks that brought down
these websites. He also tried attacking 9 to 13 root name
servers simultaneously, but in vain.
Michael pleaded guilty for 56 charges in the Montreal court
on 18th January 2001. At the age of 16, he brought down the
biggest website on the internet. He was also accused of
several security breaches of other universities like Yale and
Harvard.
Mafia boy is one of the most well known and dangerous
cyber criminals. In 2005, he wrote a column on the
computer security topics in the largest French newspaper in
North America which was also published in Montreal,
Canada. It was named ‘Le Journal de Montreal’. Three years
later, he also wrote a book ‘How I cracked the internet and
why it’s still broken’.
78 | P a g e
TWENTY SEVEN
11011. Nahshon Even-Chaim
79 | P a g e
Nahshon was the first hacker to be convicted in Australia.
He was one of the most powerful and well known hackers of
his time. Even-chaim, better known as phoenix by his
pseudonym, was part of a group of hackers known as ‘The
Realm’ in the 1980s.
Even-Chaim mainly hacked into networks by directly
dialling through X25 networks. He also made use of the
internet once it was accessible. Nahshon also tapped into
phone conversations and transmitted data through his
modem, for which he was given rigorous imprisonment for
12 months in April 1990. He also spent hours tampering
with computer systems.
Records of phone taps revealed Nahshon laughing with two
other hackers about how he had been “f***ing with NASA”.
The hacker’s arrest and prosecution details have also been
mentioned in a book called Hackers: Hunt for Australia’s
Most Infamous Computer Cracker and he has also been
profiled in Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and
Obsession
on
the
Electronic
Frontier by Suelette
Dreyfus and In the Realm of the Hackers, a film by Kevin
Anderson.
Even-Chaim pleaded guilty to 15 charges including Purdue
University, West Lafayette, Indiana for inserting data,
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation in Melbourne, for hacking and copying Zardoz,
80 | P a g e
a computer industry bulletin, Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, Livermore, California for altering data,
interfering with a computer and many more.
On 2nd April 1990, the Australian Federal Police raided
Even- Chaim’s home and he was arrested. He was charged
with 48 offences which later came down to 15, after an
agreement in which he was sentenced to 500 hours of
community service and 12 months of suspended jail term.
The skilled hacker refused to discuss the offences he
committed and has pursued music after working in the IT
field for a while.
81 | P a g e
TWENTY EIGHT
11100. Onel A. de Guzman
Onel De Guzman was the author of the famous ILOVEYOU
virus. The virus made a world record in 2000 and is said to
be the most virulent computer virus then. The virus came
with a subject titled "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt." and
clicking the message downloaded a malicious file that sent
the copy of it to all the contacts in the address book. Guzman
was a college student from Philippines at the time of
creating the virus.
Onel de Guzman was one of the suspects in a criminal
investigation by the Philippines National Bureau of
Investigation (NBI), the other being another computer
programmer named Reomel Ramores.
A local internet service provider (ISP) had informed the NBI
about receiving calls from people in Europe complaining
about the malicious file.
82 | P a g e
83 | P a g e
The love letter was a visual basic script that ran on
Microsoft Outlook by default. It replaced all other files like
MP3, JPEG, JPG, JSE, CSS, and DOC with a copy of its own
virus thereby adding a VBS extension to it.
The virus spread at an alarming rate causing damages worth
$5.5 billion around the world and 50 million infections
within a span of ten days. Guzman was convicted in
absentia.
But he was later released as there was no law in Philippines
against creating the malware. In July 2000, soon after the
ILOVEYOU virus, an E-Commerce law was enacted.
84 | P a g e
TWENTY NINE
11101. Pieter Zatko
L0pht was a hacker policy institute formed in the year 1992
in Massachusetts, USA. It was a research organization that
was active for eight years. Pieter, a.k.a Mudge was part of
L0pht and the Cult of the Dead Cow. He worked at DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as a program
manager.
Out of all the members in the hacker committee, he was one
of the first to take the initiative to build contracts and
relationships with the government. He along with the other
hackers showed the United States Senate committee that the
internet security is so poor, that they could disable it within
half an hour.
Mudge also contributed extensively to DARPA and built the
Cyber Analytical Framework and also runs a minimum of
three Department of Defence programs Military Networking
Protocol (MNP), Cyber-Insider Threat (CINDER), and Cyber
85 | P a g e
Fast Track (CFT). In 2011, he was featured in the SC
magazine as one of the top 5 influential IT thinkers.
86 | P a g e
THIRTY
11110. Raphael Gray
A British boy, who drew attention in 1999, hacked into
computers as part of a multi-million pound credit card
mission within 6 weeks.
Raphael stole credit card details and personal information
of over 26,000 customers from e-commerce websites and
posted them online to point out how insecure these
websites actually are.
The then 19 year old purchased an £800 computer to hack
into the secure websites and assumed that the police would
be able catch him as they normally never do. Gray sent Bill
Gates a bunch of Viagra tablets and posted online saying he
had a billionaire’s personal number. After this incident, he
was nicknamed as Bill gates’ hacker.
The hacker was arrested by the FBI agents with the help of
ex-hacker Chris Davis. Chris was humiliated by Gray’s
87 | P a g e
arrogance and took revenge by tracking him down within a
day.
In 2001, Gray was sentenced to three years of psychiatric
treatment.
88 | P a g e
THIRTY ONE
11111. Richard Jones
Richard along with two other hackers- Nahshon Even-Chaim
and David John Woodwick were accused of breaking into
the computer systems of the US government and defense in
the 1980s and the early 1990s.
Richard was a member of the hacker community The Realm
and was popular by his handle, ‘Electron’. The three hackers
were also accused of stealing files from an online computer
security newsletter. He trespassed into the University of
Texas computer.
The police began their investigation by tracing the online
activity and tapping phone calls between the hackers. They
were able to gather pieces of information related to how
they hacked into systems. This evidence made this case
notable for being the first prosecution of hackers under the
Australian computer crime legislation that was formed in
June 1989.
89 | P a g e
Richard was ordered to complete 300 hours of community
service and psychiatric treatment. He was sentenced to
suspended six months imprisonment in 1993.
90 | P a g e
THIRTY TWO
100000. Robert Tappan Morris
Morris is the son of the coauthor of UNIX. Morris created the
“Worm” while he was a student at Cornell University (USA),
but he made it look as if the worm was created in another
university (MIT).
According to him, initially the intent of the “worm” was to
estimate the size of the internet, but this worm created
considerable damage by exploiting the vulnerabilities and
getting access to many systems.
Amongst other vulnerabilities, the “worm” exploited the
Unix Sendmail Program and buffer overrun vulnerability in
the fingered network service.
Although the worm replicated quickly and slowed
computers to the extent of non-functionality of the internet,
it had a design flaw.
91 | P a g e
The worm was programmed to find if other computers were
already infected. But Morris anticipated that some
administrators may beat the worm by instructing the
computer to display a false positive.
92 | P a g e
To make up for this possibility, Morris directed the worm to
copy itself anyway, 14% of the time, regardless of the
response to the administrator’s instructions.
This lead to system loads that interrupted target computers.
The loss incurred due to the worm and the efforts to remove
it was anywhere from $200 to $53000 for each system.
In December 1990, Morris was sentenced to three years
probation, 400 hours of community service, a $10,050 fine
and costs of his supervision.
Morris is also highly educated as a person. In 1987 He
completed his B.A from Harvard University (USA), released
the worm while he was graduating in Cornell University in
1988. He was accused of spreading the worm in the
following year. In 1995, he along with Paul Graham
established a start up company “Viaweb”. Three years later
they sold the company to Yahoo for $48 million. In 1999, he
also pursued his PhD in Applied Sciences from Harvard.
Robert is now a professor in the department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (USA). Morris was also awarded
tenure in the year 2005. Because he created the first
computer worm on the internet in 1988, he also became the
first to be fined under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act.
93 | P a g e
THIRTY THREE
100001. Susan Headley
Susan Headley was one of the earliest female hackers. She
was born in Altona, USA in 1959.
After dropping out from school in the eight grade, she
moved to California and worked as a prostitute. Susan was
also a rock groupie at one point.
In the 1970s and early 1980s Susan was one of the most
successful and famous hackers popularly called Susan
Thunder or Suzy Thunder.
In the early 1970s she once used social engineering to get
backstage passes for a concert by claiming to be an
important person or close to the band. Social Engineering is
the method of Psychological manipulation to get
confidential information from a person.
94 | P a g e
Thunder was part of a group of Cyberpunks. By the end of
1970s she had already mastered the art of manipulating
people and mostly used it to hack into organizations.
Susan later met other popular hackers like Kevin Mitnick in
1980. Soon after she learnt the process of attacking military
computer services.
She allegedly also used her "advantages as a woman" to get
access to confidential information by "sleeping" with
security guards in certain organizations, to prove female
hackers could achieve goals that male hackers could not.
Susan said this “gave her a sense of power” over men and
the companies she hacked into. Meanwhile, the lady also
began dating Kevin Mitnick.
She became part of the Roscoe Gang with Mitnick and Lewis
de Payne (a.k.a Roscoe). They formed a ring of phone
phreaks. The group hacked into multiple network systems
in California that included U.S Leasing in 1982 and the
Digital Equipment Corporation.
Susan
was
later
employed
at
the
American
Telecommunications Corp in Los Angeles. In 1982, the
smart girl had a deal with the police and provided evidence
against Kevin and Lewis in a theft case associated to the
Pacific Bell telephone company.
95 | P a g e
Added to that, while she was working, she testified the key
evidence against de Payne in the U.S Leasing case.
Much later, Headley quit hacking and in the course of time
moved to Las Vegas, USA to become a professional poker
player. In 1994, the lady was elected to a public office in
California as City Clerk of California city.
96 | P a g e
THIRTY FOUR
100010. Vladimir Levin
97 | P a g e
Vladimir is a Russian programmer, who got arrested while
he was in the process of committing a bank fraud. The
graduate of St. Petersburg Tecknologichesky University
committed one of the biggest and best organized wire
transfer fraud till date.
Levin was employed as a mathematician at the AO Saturn,
St. Petersburg Company when he committed the crime in
1994. The 23 year old stole access codes and passwords of
wealthy corporate customers of Citibank and transferred
US$ 10.7 million to bank accounts of other accomplices in
Israel, USA and Europe via dial up wire transfer service.
Citibank had detected two suspicious money transfers in
August 1994 that amounted to US$ 4, 00,000, which is when
they approached the FBI. Later with the help of Russian
authorities, they tracked down the illegal money transfers.
In order to reduce suspicion, Levin operated late nights
during New York business hours.
Citibank claimed that they had recovered US$ 4, 00,000 out
of the US$ 10.7 million. They upgraded all their security
procedures and systems to use Dynamic Encryption Card, a
physical authentication token.
In 1998, Levin was sentenced to three years imprisonment.
He was also required to pay $240,000 to Citibank, so that
most of the amount stolen was acquired.
98 | P a g e
99 | P a g e
HACKER GROUPS
100 | P a g e
ONE
1. ANONYMOUS
Anonymous is an independent Hactivist group that came
into existence in 2003. The term “Anonymous” could mean
anyone from any part of the world and so, it’s a
disconnected group.
101 | P a g e
The benefit of being anonymous is that it does not reveal the
identity or name of the hacker and each person, being
entitled to their opinion can post their views online for or
against a subject and not worry about being judged.
Anonymous initially operated on an image board named
4chan. The virtual community mainly aims at protesting
against internet censorship and internet surveillance.
They can be identified in a crowd by their ‘Guy Fawkes’
masks. Their method of hacking usually includes publicized
web defacement and distributed denial of service attacks
(DDoS).
These controversial attacks and the members of Anonymous
have significantly increased from 2008.
Anonymous is linked to a range of internet platforms like
Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Dramatica, 4chan and others. Their
only motto is “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do
not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.”
In the last few years, Anonymous has brought down
websites of the FBI and the US Department of Justice.
In protest against the government surveillances,
Anonymous in April 2012, also hacked into government
websites of UK, USA, Iran, Turkey, Australia, Libya, Chile,
Columbia, Algeria, New Zealand and more.
102 | P a g e
Anonymous has also classified the campaign against Kony as
a scam. However, they continue to support the Kony 2012
campaign by Invisible children.
Recently, MTNL and Reliance Communications received
John Doe orders to block file hosting on websites.
Some of the most recent hacks by Anonymous with respect
to India include Reliance Communications for them to stop
blocking websites like Pirate Bay, Vimeo, etc. that allows file
hosting.
Apparently, Reliance was hacked within 5 minutes. ISPs like
MTNL were hacked as they were responsible for restricting
file sharing.
Anonymous also established tie ups with Wikileaks for
sharing their views and protesting against internet
censorship more openly. The secret partnership was visible
when Anonymous disabled corporate websites like Paypal,
MasterCard, Sony and Visa after these companies
discontinued business deals with Wikileaks.
Many of these hackitivists from different countries have
been suspects for participating in DDoS attacks and most of
them have been sentenced to imprisonment and ordered to
pay a fine of hundreds of dollars.
The reason Anonymous is a group despite the fact that its
members do not know one another is because they all work
103 | P a g e
for the same cause. If at any point, someone chooses to
disagree with the agenda of the group they can voluntarily
resign from the cause. The protest however is continued by
the rest.
Protest actions attributed to anonymous
(Source: Wikipedia.org)
The Pirate Bay
In April 2009, after The Pirate Bay co-defendants were
found guilty of facilitating extensive copyright infringement
"in a commercial and organized form", Anonymous
launched a coordinated DDoS attack against the
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry
(IFPI), an organisation responsible for safeguarding
recording artists' rights.
When co-founders lost their appeal against convictions for
encouraging piracy, Anonymous again targeted the IFPI,
labelling them "parasites".
A statement read: "We will continue to attack those who
embrace censorship. You will not be able to hide your
ludicrous ways to control us."
Anonymous supporters at an Occupy OKC rally near the
Oklahoma State Capitol Building.
104 | P a g e
Megaupload
On January 19, 2012, Megaupload, a website providing file
sharing services, was shut down by the US Department of
Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
This led to what Anonymous called "the single largest
Internet attack in its history".Barrett Brown, described as a
spokesperson for the group Anonymous by news outlet RT,
said the timing of the raid "couldn’t have come at a worse
time in terms of the government’s standpoint".
SOPA
With the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) protests only a day
old, it was claimed that internet users were "by-and-far
ready to defend an open Internet".
Brown told RT that the Department of Justice website was
shut down only 70 minutes after the start of the attack. Days
later many of the sites were still down or slow to load.
The attack disabled a number of websites, including those
belonging to the Justice Department, the FBI, Universal
Music Group, the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA),
and Broadcast Music, Inc.
"Even without SOPA having been passed yet, the federal
government always had tremendous power to do some of
105 | P a g e
the things that they want to do. So if this is what can occur
without SOPA being passed, imagine what can occur after
SOPA is passed," Brown commented.
Although the actions of Anonymous received support, some
commentators argued that the denial of service attack
risked damaging the anti-SOPA case.
The attack included a new, sophisticated method whereby
internet users who clicked on links placed in chat rooms and
on Twitter participated, some without their knowledge, in a
denial of service attack, thereby breaking existing US law.
Anonymous used "Low Orbit Ion Cannon" (LOIC) to attack
supporters of SOPA on January 19, 2012. Anonymous
claimed this to be their largest attack with over 5,635
people participating in the DDoS attack via LOIC.
LOIC was utilized by many attackers, despite the fact that a
network firewall could easily filter out network traffic it
generates, thus rendering it only partly effective.
In addition, LOIC attacks were easily identified in system
logs, making it possible to trace the attacker's IP address
and allowing arrests to be made by these law enforcement
agencies.
106 | P a g e
Kony
Anonymous has described the Kony 2012 campaign by
Invisible Children as "propaganda". Although they support
the campaign against Kony, they felt that the campaign is
mainly a scam.
Government websites
Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down
government websites in the UK on April 2012 in protest
against government extradition and surveillance policies. A
message was left on Twitter saying it was "for your
draconian surveillance proposals".
Occupy movement
Anonymous activists merged with Occupy Wall Street
protesters. Anonymous members descended on New York's
Zucotti Park and organized it partly.
After it became known that some Occupy protesters would
get violent, Anonymous used social networking to urge
Occupy protesters to avoid disorder. Anonymous used
Twitter trends to keep protests peaceful.
A similar protest occurred outside the London Stock
Exchange in early May 2012 during a May Day Occupy
protest.
107 | P a g e
Wanted criminals
Alleged Internet predator Chris Forcand, 53, was charged
with child sexual and firearm offenses. A newspaper report
stated that Forcand was already being tracked by "cybervigilantes before police investigations commenced.
A television report identified a "self-described Internet
vigilante group called Anonymous" who contacted the police
after some members were "propositioned" by Forcand.
The report stated this was the first time a suspected
Internet predator was arrested by the police as a result of
Internet vigilantism.
In October 2011, "Operation Darknet" was launched as an
attempt to cease the activities of child porn sites accessed
through hidden services in the deep web.
Anonymous published in a pastebin link what it claimed
were the user names of 1,589 members of Lolita City, a child
porn site accessed via the Tor network.
Anonymous said that it had found the site via The Hidden
Wiki, and that it contained over 100 gigabytes of child
pornography. Anonymous launched a denial-of-service
attack to take Lolita City offline.
108 | P a g e
Religious Organizations
The group gained worldwide press for Project Chanology,
the protest against the Church of Scientology.
The project was started in response to the Church of
Scientology's attempts to remove material from a highly
publicized interview with Scientologist Tom Cruise from the
Internet in January 2008.
The project was publicly launched in the form of a video
posted to YouTube, "Message to Scientology", on January 21,
2008.
The video states that Anonymous views Scientology's
actions as Internet censorship, and asserts the group's
intent to "expel the church from the Internet".
As of early 2011, the organisation has also targeted the
Westboro Baptist Church, releasing several videos on a
range of related topics, such as their controversial preaching
against Homosexuality.
Several attacks have been made on the primary website, one
that was even made while Shirley Phelps-Roper was
debating a representative of Anonomous in a televised
interview on the David Pakman show.
109 | P a g e
LGBT issues
On August 2012 Anonymous hacked into Ugandan
government websites in protest of pending homophobic
bills. A message stated:
"Anonymous will continue to target Ugandan government
sites and communications until the government of Uganda
treats all people including LGBT people equally".
Other activities
In late May 2012 alleged Anonymous members claimed
responsibility for taking down a GM crops website.
In October 2011, Anonymous hackers threatened the
Mexican drug cartel known as Los Zetas in an online video
after one of their members was kidnapped.
The group is responsible for cyber-attacks on the Pentagon,
News Corp and has also threatened to destroy Facebook.
110 | P a g e
TWO
10. CHAOS COMPUTER CLUB
111 | P a g e
One of the world’s largest hacker organizations is known as
the Chaos Computer club. This group is chiefly based out of
Germany and other countries where German is principal
spoken language.
It was created in Berlin, in 1981. The group considers itself
"a galactic community of life forms, independent of age, sex,
race or societal orientation, which strives across borders for
freedom of information....”.
They promote a transparent government, freedom of
information, the fundamental human right for
communication.
The Chaos Computer Club rose to fame when they found and
revealed the security flaws of the German Bildschirmtext
computer network to the public.
The system provider had failed to respond to the report
regarding security flaws, which was submitted by the Chaos
Computer Club.
The group then caused a debit of 1,34,000 Deutsche Mark in
a Hamburg bank in favour of the Chaos Computer Club. The
very next day, the money was returned in front of the press.
Many of the groups exploits are well documented.
112 | P a g e
The group was involved in 1989 in the first cyber espionage
case to make headlines internationally. They are also known
for their public demonstrations of flaws in security systems.
The Club also hosts yearly event known as the Chaos
Communication Congress. The event is attended by at least
4500 participants yearly.
113 | P a g e
THREE
11. CULT OF THE DEAD COW
114 | P a g e
The Cult of the Dead Cow is also known as cDc or cDc
Communications. It is a computer hacker organisation
founded in Lubbock, Texas in June 1984 at slaughterhouse
by Grandmaster Ratte, Franken Gibe, and Sid Vicious. The
organisation is also a parent organisation of the Ninja Strike
force and Hacktivismo.
Ninja Strike force is a group of elite members who are
dedicated to achieving goals both online and offline. In 2006
the organisation launched its own micro site.
Hacktivismo is a group which is dedicated to the creation of
anti censorship laws. The group also seeks to apply the
Universal Declaration of human rights over the internet.
Throughout the 1980’s the group was also very well known
for its underground e-magazine.
Over the years, the Cult of the Dead Cow has also released
several computer security and some “Hacker tools”. These
include:
+ The Automated Prayed Project – a Terminal connected to
a Sun systems work station via a serial cable.
+ Back Orifice-a program designed for remote system
administration.
115 | P a g e
+ Back Orifice 2000 –a very similar to Back Orifice. It was
released in 1999.
+ Camera/Shy – a Steganographic program.
+ NBName – A program used to carry out Denial of service
Attacks.
+ ScatterChat – A secure Instant messaging client.
+ The Six/Four System – a Censorship resistant network
Proxy.
+ SMBRelay and SMBRelay 2 – programs used to carry out
Server message block man in the middle attacks.
+ Torpark – A variant of a portable Firefox web browser
with Tor built in.
+ Whisker – A project to check for security vulnerabilities on
web servers.
116 | P a g e
FOUR
100. DIGITAL DAWGPOUND
The Digital DawgPound is a group of hackers who are
popular for a series of articles in the hacker magazines. The
group encourages new recruits who want to learn about
hacking and tries to teach them the positive attributes in an
attempt to deter them away from negative elements.
The Digital DawgPound tries to prove that hackers can not
only be an integral part the development of technology, but
society as well.
The Binary Revolution is one of the most popular projects
done by the group. The project was meant to bring together
hacker communities for a common and positive goal which
would benefit the society.
The Digital DawgPound also maintains a blog which they
refer to as “blawg”.
117 | P a g e
FIVE
101. GENOCIDE2600
Travis Ogden was the founder of genocide2600. His reason
for the disturbing name was apparently to make people
twitch so they react.
The members came together in 1985 and their activities
included telephone phreaking, developing codes for
benefiting from telephony systems and sharing it with
Bulletin Board systems. They eventually also got the hang of
social engineering.
Genocide2600 also actively fought
pornography on AOL and other sites.
against
child
Few members of the group also joined other hackers,
formed a community by the name “Ethical Hackers against
Paedophilia” to battle against child pornography.
118 | P a g e
The group also promoted software applications like Snort
and Packetstorm.
Currently, the members of the group cannot be traced. As
they have worked on diverse attacks, even the publications
about them are scattered.
119 | P a g e
SIX
110. GLOBALHELL
Some of the most notable hacks performed by the globalHell
are the intrusions into the White House, systems of the US
military, US Cellular and postal systems. Apart from these,
the members have also been accused of countless web
defacements, leaking sensitive information and stealing
financial information.
The globalHell comprised of about 60 members who fell
apart after one- fifth of them were charged with computer
intrusion and a few others for committing similar crimes.
120 | P a g e
SEVEN
111. GOATSE SECURITY
121 | P a g e
Goatse Security was a loosely associated group of about nine
grey hat hackers formed in 2009. Their main target was to
bring out defects in the security of different systems. The
group is also affiliated to Gay Nigger Association of America.
The hackers managed to gather email addresses of over one
lakh iPad users and leaked the information. Later in June
2010, Goatse Security again brought out the security flaws
in AT&T website. At that point, AT&T was the only was the
only 3G service provider.
There was an important argument regarding the procedures
to sort out security problems after the attacks by Goatse
security. The members of the group leaked chat logs and
were able to get critical information by detecting the defects
of various systems.
In May 2011, Goatse security also pointed out the Denial of
Service vulnerabilities that affect multiple Linux
distributions.
After the investigation of iPad user case, two members from
the group were accused of criminal charges.
122 | P a g e
EIGHT
1000. HACKER DOJO
Hacker Dojo is an organization that is located in Mount ain
View, California, USA. David Weekly, Jeff Lindsay, Brian
Klug, Melissalynn Perkins, Kitt Hodsden formed the
community Center in 2009.
123 | P a g e
Hacker Dojo is an open to all types of hackers and is mainly
present to encourage working on software projects.
Anybody is free to join as a member in the group.
The members can feel free to organize events and the Dojo
is considered to be an open communal space. They have also
been sponsored by some of the large companies like
Microsoft, Google, Palantir technologies and more.
Over the years they have expanded their group and have
affiliations with Noisebridge, NYC Resistor, Pumping Station
One and SuperHappyDevHouse.
The main purpose of the hackerspace is to conduct events,
gather to socialize and create a pleasant working
atmosphere.
Professionals from different start up companies like
SkyDera, NetworkedBlogs and MicroMobs in Silicon Valley
work at the Hacker Dojo, which is approximately 1,200
square meters.
124 | P a g e
NINE
1001. HACKWEISER
The Hackweiser was active for around five years, between
1999 and 2003. The group was a combination of grey hat
and Black hat hackers.
Some of the important members of the group were p4ntera,
BigHawk, Squirrlman and R4ncid. However, p4ntera
dropped out of the group in 2001.
125 | P a g e
The underground hacker group has brought down several
websites and been responsible for web defacements on sites
like Walmart, Microsoft, Sony, DARE and plenty more.
In April 2001, they claimed to have started an attack named
Project China that targeted against the Mainland Chinese
computer systems.
The Hackweiser has also won several awards in the “State of
Hack awards”. After the arrest of Hackah Jak in 2003, the
group slowly discontinued working together.
126 | P a g e
TEN
1010. HARFORD HACKERSPACE
127 | P a g e
Harford hackerspace is a group that originated in earl2009.
It was located in the Harford Country, Maryland which is
how the name was born. David Powell, Miles Pekala, Chris
Cockrum, Paul King, Gary Cygel are some of the founders of
the hackerspace.
They came together with an aim to make a social
environment for individuals to share their ideas, exchange
opinions and hence became a non-profit 501(C) (3)
charitable organization.
Some of their important achievements are the Project
featured on MSDN Channel9, Red Bull Creation 2011
finalist; they were also the winner for the “Best Hardware
prototype- Group” project in Baltimore Hackathon 2010.
Their Do it yourself CNC was also featured in a book by John
Baichtal named "Hack this: 24 Incredible Hackerspace
Projects from the DIY Movement".
128 | P a g e
ELEVEN
1011. HELITH
This is a hacker group that was active in Germany since
1999. The think tank was a combination of black hat, white
hat and grey hat hackers. The term Helith in German meant
the “Heroes” and was also affiliated to another hacker group
Milw0rm.
The group works on areas like malware and network
security and is scattered worldwide.
129 | P a g e
Some of the members of Helith include Benkei, ConCode,
Cyneox, Rembrandt, Rott_En, Skyout and Zarathu. The other
locations where their members are present are Russia,
Africa, Columbia and more.
The reason for forming the community was so members
could share their opinions and ideas without hesitating
about being judged on any basis.
They worked on computer hardware and came up with
security advisories affecting PF firewall, Open SSH and
others.
They have apparently also been able to intrude into
Deutsche Bank’s internal network. Very little information
has been disclosed about the group. And hence, the rest of
the members are not traceable.
130 | P a g e
TWELVE
1100. HONKER UNION
The Honker Union were a bunch of Hackitivists. The word
Honker came into existence in May 1999 after the USA
attacked the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. This is when
the Honker Union was formed.
The term “Honker” means Red Guest. It also goes with their
logo and refers to the communist party. The Union was
mainly formed to promote and support the Chinese
Government against the United States.
131 | P a g e
The Honkers felt strongly patriotic and are presently paired
up with the Red Hacker Alliance. The group claimed to have
attacked the website of a Tibetan writer. She also opposed
official policy and hence they hacked into her skype account
and accessed her mails.
There have been rumours about the Chinese government
working with the Honker Union. However, there is no clear
evidence so far.
132 | P a g e
THIRTEEN
1101. IPHONE DEV TEAM
The iPhone development team were a bunch of intellectual
individuals, mostly engineers, who came together to create
softwares that would allow users to use application that
were otherwise unauthorized by Apple.
They created the ultrasn0w that allows an unofficial carrier
unlock for jailbroken iphones. Redsn0w is another tool
developed by the team that is used to jailbreak iPods,
iPhones and iPads. By the help of these tools, users could
use options like deep customization and international
roaming.
It was discovered that in 2008, over 1.6 million devices in
the world used the tools developed by the iPhone Dev Team.
133 | P a g e
FOURTEEN
1110. L0PHT
L0pht Heavy Industries was a hacker collective which
operated from 1992 to 2000 in the Boston. It was originally
started for its members to store their computer hardware
and to simultaneously work on projects. Eventually, a
business venture known as L0pht Heavy Industries was
formed.
134 | P a g e
The hacker think tank developed several security advisories
and produced very popular tools such as L0phtCrack.
In 1998, all the seven members of the L0pht declared to the
Congress of the United States of America that they could
very easily shut down the entire internet within thirty
minutes. In 1999 L0pht declared that their objective was to
improve the state of the art in security.
Eventually, L0pht merged with a start-up known as @stake,
which was obtained by Symantec in late 2004. As of 2009,
L0phtCrack version 6 contained support for 64-bit Windows
platforms as well.
The important members of the Group are Brian Oblivion,
Count Zero, Dildog, Golgo, Joe Grand, Silicosis, Space Rogue,
Stefan, Thomas Icom, Weld Pond, White Knight, and Mudge.
135 | P a g e
FIFTEEN
1111. LULZRAFT
The lulzraft rose to fame internationally in 2011 after they
attacked websites of the Conservative party of Canada,
Husky Energy and other Canadian websites.
It has been assumed that the hacker group strongly disliked
the Conservative party of Canada as they broke into their
systems twice consecutively.
The first time, posted rumours about the Canadian
president Stephen Harper, saying that he was admitted to
the Toronto General Hospital as he choked on hash brown
while having his breakfast.
The news rapidly spread, and was believed by many. Once it
was on twitter, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister
denied the rumour. Lulzraft declared they committed the
attack on 7th June 2011.
136 | P a g e
The following day, they also admitted that since the
Conservative Party had “terrible security”, they were also
able to successfully access information about party’s donors
on 7th June 2011 from the database.
On the same day, the group claimed to have attacked a
company named Husky energy, where they assured free gas
to anyone who used the code “hash brown” to pacify
members of the Conservative who were disgruntled by their
previous hacks.
137 | P a g e
SIXTEEN
10000. LULZSEC
138 | P a g e
Lulz Security or Lulzsec was a hacker community formed in
May 2011. Some of the important members of the group
were Sabu, Topiary, Kayla, T-flow, Avunit and Pwnsauce.
Their first attack was on Fox.com. Before forming a group of
their own, the seven members were a part of another
community, Internet Feds, which was linked with
Anonymous. The group hacked into various corporate as
well as government systems.
Lulzsec admitted that they hacked into American Public
Broadcasting system (PBS) to indicate their support
towards WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning. This made them
internationally well known. Initially, they hacked into 3,100
ATMs (Automated Teller Machine) in the U.K and exposed
their transaction logs.
The members of the group stole passwords of Linked In
profiles and names on 73,000 X Factor contestants to leak
them. The group mainly became popular for their sarcastic
messages and leaking sensitive information of people on
other websites.
Not only did they hack into networks of different companies,
the hackers always released information to the public. It
seemed like they did not really use their intelligence to gain
profit. Instead, they only hacked for the fun of it.
139 | P a g e
The hackers declared their pair up with Anonymous on June
2009 for “Operation Anti-Security”. Lulzsec attacked a series
of companies one after the other between 8th June and 16th
June.
The list included websites of Black & Berg Cyber security
consulting, pron.com, Bethesda Game Studios and messed
up sites by posting random information on Mediafire and
Amazon.com.
In March 2012, two suspects from Britain were charged for
being involved with Lulzsec. On 26th June 2012, the
members came up with a “50 days of Lulz” statement that
ensured the group had 7 hackers and that they would
terminate their website lulzsecurity.com.
140 | P a g e
SEVENTEEN
10001. MASTERS OF DECEPTION
The Masters of Deception are a hacker group based out of
New York. They were widely known for their attacks on
telephone companies. The members of the group include
Mark Abene, Paul Stira, Eli Ladopoulos, HAC, John Lee, and
Julio Fernandez. The group also includes members from the
Cult of the Dead Cow.
The group functions in a fundamentally different manner
from previous hacking groups. The group believed that
members should earn their position through various levels
of initiation. A public demonstration of skill was a necessary
part of the initiation.
The group was disbanded in 1992 when five of the members
of the group were arrested as a part of a major nationwide
investigation lead by the FBI. All the five members plead
guilty and were sentenced.
141 | P a g e
EIGHTEEN
10010. MILW0RM
The Milw0rm were Hackitivists who came together in 1998.
They committed a series of hacks for political purposes like
posting an anti-nuclear weapon agenda and peace message
on the websites.
The members of Milw0rm were from different parts of the
world like New Zealanc, United States and the United
Kingdom. They had also made the record for the largest
hack of their time.
Milw0rm became internally well known on 3rd June 1998
after they intruded systems of the Bhabha Atomic Research
Centre (BARC) which is the main nuclear research facility of
India. They later also pointed out the security flaws they
found in the BARC systems.
On the night of the attack, the hackers used a machine that
was US military.mil and gained root access by breaking into
their local area connection. They could observe the flaws in
142 | P a g e
the security and accessed confidential information stored in
files and documents related to India’s nuclear weapons
program.
The case first made news on Wired.com. Forbes later called
the attack “potentially the most devastating” incident of
1998.
Apart from this, Milw0rm also hacked into Turkish nuclear
facility and British Web hosting company Easyspace.
143 | P a g e
NINETEEN
10011. NETWORK CRACK PROGRAM HACKER
GROUP
The NCPH group comprises of four main members who are
Wicked Rose, KuNgBim, Charles, and Rodag. The group in all
had approximately ten hackers. The hacker group is situated
in Sichuan Province, China and was led by Tan Dailin
(Wicked Rose).
Wicked Rose took part in the Chengdu Military Command
Network Attack/Defense Competition. Once he won it, the
group leader learnt how to design hacking tools, start
attacks and the method to make network-infiltration
strategies.
The group is widely known for their free courses that they
offer on remote network control programs. Eventually they
hacked into over 40 percent of the hacker association
websites in China and were looked upon by other hackers.
144 | P a g e
The leader of the group, which started in 2006, also created
a GinWui Rootkit that was used to attack on the USA and
Japan. Two different versions of the rootkit were explained
to the US to hack the Department of Defence.
The rootkit replicated through Word documents and
created a backdoor in the system. With the help of this, it
was able to perform numerous functions like starting and
killing processes, manipulating services, create, edit, delete
or modify data in folders and also gather information about
the damaged computers.
They also actively blogged about Spear Phishing, targeted a
workers of a US oil company and damaged power point
documents and accessed Emails of the workers.
The hackers were interviewed by Time which was
documented in an article on Chinese government’s cyber
operations. The article was against the US government.
Wicked Rose particularly claimed that he paid each member
of the NCPH group and handled relationships with sponsors.
In 2009, he was charged with Distributed denial of service
attacks on 3800hk, HackerXfiles and hackbase. This resulted
in him spending seven and half years in prison.
145 | P a g e
TWENTY
10100. PHONE LOSERS OF AMERICA
146 | P a g e
The Phone losers of America (PLA) came up with their first
product PLA e-zine in 1990. The American group engaged in
a range of activities like prank calling, phone phreaking and
launched their website (http://www.phonelosers.org/) in
1994.
The PLA first released their online magazine called e-zine
that was electronically circulated via a dial-up bulletin
board system (BBS). The issues of the magazine focused on
subjects like call forwarding hacking, red box, BBS hacking
and others. The other mischievous acts were Phone
Mobbing where they also targeted a show called Loveline on
MTV. They repeatedly called the same number to simply
frustrate the party.
Besides these, the PLA also released PLA Radio in 2006 that
featured advertisements, shows, pranks and other comedy
shows; PLA TV where there were videos and serials like
EvilCal and RBCP. These shows were also on Youtube.
The PLA tops the list in Alexa’s “prank call” category.
147 | P a g e
Republic
of Cyberia
To download great stuff and win lots of goodies, visit:
www.facebook.com/republic.of.cyberia