The document discusses 10 famous hackers throughout history. It describes Jonathan James as the first juvenile imprisoned for cybercrime after gaining notoriety through system intrusions. It also mentions Gary McKinnon, who was accused of the "biggest military computer hack of all time". Finally, it discusses Adrian Lamo, who broke into high-profile networks including The New York Times, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

1. 10 Best Hackers The World Has Ever Known

2. 16-year-old black hat hacker Jonathan James, became the first juvenile imprisoned for cybercrime. James gained his
notoriety by implementing a series of successful intrusions into various systems.
In an anonymous PBS interview, he professes, “I was just looking around, playing around. What was fun for me was a
challenge to see what I could pull off.”

3. In 2002, an exceptionally odd message appeared on a US Army computer screen: “Your security system is crap,” it read. “I am
Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”
It was later identified as the work of Scottish systems administrator, Gary McKinnon, who was accused of perpetrating the
“biggest military computer hack of all time”.
He is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between, using the name
‘Solo’.

4. Adrian Lamo is a Colombian-American threat analyst and hacker. He used coffee shops, libraries and internet cafés as his
locations for hacking.
Apart from being the homeless hacker, Lamo is widely-known for breaking into a series of high-profile computer
networks, which include The New York Times, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and MCI WorldCom.
In 2002, he added his name to the The New York Times’ internal database of expert sources and utilized LexisNexis
account to conduct research on high-profile subjects.

5. George Francis Hotz, alias geohot, or simply mil, is an American hacker known for unlocking the iPhone, allowing the
phone to be used with other wireless carriers, contrary to AT&T and Apple’s intent.
Additionally, he developed the limera1n jailbreak tool, which used his limera1n bootrom exploit.
In June, 2007, Hotz became the first person to carrier unlock an iPhone. According to Hotz’s blog, he traded his 2nd
unlocked 8 GB iPhone to Terry Daidone, the founder of Certicell, for a Nissan 350Z and three 8 GB iPhones.
Hotz said he wanted to give the iPhones to the other members of the team who created the hack with him. His name
will forever be associated with the April 2011 PlayStation breach

6. A self-proclaimed “hacker poster boy,” Mitnick went through a highly publicized pursuit by authorities. His mischief
was hyped by the media but his actual offenses may be less notable than his notoriety suggests.
The Department of Justice describes him as “the most wanted computer criminal in United States history.” His
exploits were detailed in two movies: Freedom Downtime and Takedown.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Mitnick gained unauthorized access to dozens of computer networks
while he was a fugitive. He used cloned cellular phones to hide his location and, among other things, copied
valuable proprietary software from some of the country’s largest cellular telephone and computer companies.
Mitnick also intercepted and stole computer passwords, altered computer networks, and broke into and read private
e-mail.

7. A high school student from West Island, Michael Demon Calce best known as “MafiaBoy”. He launched a series of
widely known denial-of-service attacks against large commercial websites, including Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Dell,
eBay, and CNN.
He hacked Yahoo! when it was still the web’s leading search engine and caused it to shutdown for about an hour.

8. Robert Tappan Morris is an American computer scientist, best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988. That
was considered the first computer worm on the Internet.
Also he was the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Morris created the worm while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. He released the worm from MIT
to conceal the fact that it actually originated from Cornell. The worm took down one-tenth of the Internet,
crippling 6,000 plus computer systems. It didn’t take long for the police to track him down.

9. The notorious ’80s black hat hacker, Kevin Poulsen, also known as Dark Dante, gained recognition for his hack of
LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines, which earned him a brand new Porsche, among other items. Law enforcement
dubbed him “the Hannibal Lecter of computer crime.”
Authorities began to pursue Poulsen after he hacked into a federal investigation database. During this pursuit, he
further drew the ire of the FBI by hacking into federal computers for wiretap information.
His hacking specialty, however, revolved around telephonesHowever, since serving time, Poulsen has worked as a
journalist and is now a senior editor for Wired News.
Poulsen’s most note-worthy article details his work on identifying 744 sex offenders with MySpace profiles.

10. Albert Gonzalez is a computer hacker and computer criminal who is accused of masterminding the combined credit
card theft and subsequent reselling of more than 170 million card and ATM numbers from 2005 through 2007—the
biggest such fraud in history.
Gonzalez’s team used SQL injection techniques to create malware backdoors on several corporate systems in order
to launch packet-sniffing (specifically, ARP Spoofing) attacks, allowing him to steal computer data from internal
corporate networks.
When he was arrested, authorities seized $1.6 million in cash including $1.1 million found in plastic bags placed in a
three-foot drum which had been buried in his parents’ backyard. On March 25, 2010, Gonzalez was sentenced to
20 years in federal prison.

11. Vladimir Levin is a Russian-born Jewish individual famed for his involvement in the attempt to fraudulently
transfer US$10.7 million via Citibank’s computers.
However, his career as a hacker was only short lived, with a capture, imprisonment and recovery of all but
$400,000 of the original $10 million.
During Levin’s 1997 trial in the United States, he was said to have coordinated the first ever internet bank raid.
The truth is Levin’s ability to transfer Citibank client funds to his own accounts was possible through stolen
account numbers and PINs.
Levin’s scam was a simple interception of clients’ calls while recording the punched in account numbers.