7 Most Famous Web Criminals of All Time
Among the list of dreaded web criminals, it is the list of web hackers that are considered as the most threatening, potentially, with capacity to enter into a network security and demolish complete website or intranet within the organization. The hackers on the basis of their job nature are divided into two major categories, the black hat hackers and white hat hackers. Following, is the list of some of the most notorious web criminals of time.
Jonathan James: He was the first person to be imprisoned on the charges of hacking at the age of 16. One of the biggest interventions as made by him was into backdoor entry into Defense Threat Reduction Agency server. It is an agency of the Department of Defense charged with reducing the threat to the U.S and its allies from nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional and special weapons. And another serious charge on him is of entering into NASA computers and taking away software nearly worth $1.7 million.
Adrian Lamo: He is known for his heinous capacity due to which he just entered into the website of the reputed organizations like ‘The New York Times’ and Microsoft. He is dubbed and termed as “homeless hacker” and for the purposes; he used Internet connections at Kinko’s coffee shops and libraries for hacking websites. He used to do penetration testing to found out flaws in security and then informing companies about flaws in them. He with his capacity to penetrate hit companies like Yahoo!, Bank of America, Citigroup and Cingular.
Kevin Mitnick: He is defamed in American department of justice as the most wanted computer criminal in the history of the United States. And his web hacking adventures have been discussed in detail in two movies: Freedom Downtime and Takedown. He started his hacking adventures from the Los Angeles punch card system as to obtain free bus rides and went into the big league of crime consisting steps like hacking into the computers, stealing computer secrets, scrambling phone networks and breaching national defense warning system.
Kevin Poulsen: Known as Dark Dante, he is famed for hacking of LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines, which let him to be owner of a brand new Porsche apart from other items. However, authorities started pursing him when he hacked into a federal investigation database. He is considered as an expert in tapping telephones where in KIIS-FM case, he is recognized for taking over all telephone lines of the stations.
Robert Tappan Morris: He was a son of a former National Security Agency scientist Robert Morris and is recognized for creating Morris Worm, the first of the computer worm that was released on the Internet. For this guilt, he was tried under and was the first person to be prosecuted under 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Interestingly, presently, he is working as a tenured professor at the MIT Computer and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Stephen Wozniak: “Woz” who is considered as another Steve at Apple and recipient of National Medal of Technology and honorary doctorates from Kettering University and Nova Southeastern University. He started his career hacking making blue boxes, devices that bypass telephone switching mechanism to make free long distance calls.
Tim Berners-Lee: He is known to be the inventor of the famous World Wide Web that let one to have access to sites, documents and files on the Internet. For the feat he received numerous awards and prizes including the most famous Millennium Technology Prize. While as a student he was caught hacking access to the banned computers from the University computers.