history's most notorious hackers
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From phone phreaking with cereal box whistles to make free long distance phone calls to stealing credit card numbers and making millions in fraudulent purchases, hacking has certainly come a long way – both in technology and in motive. This week we look at some of history’s most notorious hackers, and the fate they met when the law caught up with their illegal activities.TRANSCRIPT
History’s most notorious hackers
From phone phreaking with cereal box whistles
to make free long distance phone calls to stealing
credit card numbers and making millions in
fraudulent purchases, hacking has certainly come
a long way – both in technology and in motive.
This week we look at some of history’s most
notorious hackers, and the fate they met when
the law caught up with their illegal activities.
By Jeff Jedras
Image courtesy of chanpipat at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Born in California in 1965, Poulsen’s most
well-known hack is his takeover of the
phone lines of a Los Angeles radio station,
ensuring he would win the contest prize –
a Porsche 944 S2 – as the 102nd caller.
Similarly, when he was sought by the FBI
and featured on the television program
Unsolved Mysteries, the show’s tip line
mysteriously crashed.
After his release from prison he became a
journalist, and is now an editor for Wired
News.
Kevin Poulsen
Born in 1965, Morris, a computer scientist, has
the distinction of creating the first computer
worm on the Internet in 1988. The Morris Worm
also led to him being the first person convicted
under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
After turning white hat, he would co-found
online store Viaweb and co-found funding firm Y-
Combinator.
He’s now a professor of electrical engineering
and computer science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Robert Tappan Morris
Born in 1943 as the son of a US Air Force
engineer, Draper is a former phone phreak
whose aliases included Captain Crunch.
He helped design the first multifrequency
tone generator (known as a blue box) that
allowed the user to make free calls from
payphones – the tone was the same as that
emitted by a whistle given away in Captain
Crunch cereal – hence, the nickname.
After serving his time, he briefly worked for
Apple, and he now writes security software
and is a developer for a VoIP client.
John Draper
Born in 1983, James was the first juvenile
incarcerated for a cybercrime in the US when,
at age 15, he hacked into a number of systems,
including his local school and a division of the
Defence Department.
He was investigated in connection to the 2007
TJX hacking, but no evidence was found to
linking him to the crime.
He would later commit suicide, citing fear of
being prosecuted for a crime he didn’t commit.
Jonathan James
Born in 1981, Gonzalez was accused of
being behind the largest case of credit
and debit card theft in history, using a
SQL injection to deploy backdoors on
corporate systems to launch packet
sniffers and steal corporate data.
He was indicted in three cases – Dave &
Busters, TJ Maxx and Heartland Payment
– and he was sentenced to 20 years in
federal prison in 2010.
Albert Gonzalez