World's Most Famous Hackers and Their Stories

Hackers, who are the nightmare of the information world, have actually succeeded in making their name known all over the world with their intelligence. For some, being a hobby is a hobby for some, and for others, hacking is a skill-themed activity rather than a profession.

Every year a world-famous company in America invites hackers from all over the world and organizes a competition. At the end of this competition, it offers the winning hacker job opportunity with a huge reward and a very high salary. And oddly enough, no hacker who won this contest has ever accepted the job. He won the contest, hacked the project he wanted to be hacked and returned to his country. As can be seen from this example, being a hacker is not a profession but a passion for some...

1- Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman is the founder of the modern day GNU operating system. During his school years, Stallman worked simultaneously in the Emacs project as a "permanent white hacker" at MIT. While he was working in this project, he gained fame in the hacker community by breaking the encrypted protection system that was established and making it open to students.

2- Gary McKinnon

Gary McKinnon, a Scottish hacker, is the culprit in the biggest military hacking of all time. McKinnon has logged on to a handful of US military computers and 16 NASA computers.

3- Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds started the computer world with the Commodore VIC-20. The hacking work that made him famous was the modification of the home computer Sinclair's operating system and making it more usable. Torvalds has become a world-renowned name in 1991 with the creation of Windows' biggest competitor, the Linux system.

4- Kevin Poulsen

Known as "Dark Dante" in the hacker community, Kevin Poulsen has a reputation for his highly creative activity. Poulsen entered the LA radio radio house's KIIS-FM phone lines and won a Porsche and a number of other awards with the raffle. Poulsen received a five-year sentence following his capture.

5- Robert Tappan Morris

In 1988, he was the creator of the Morris worm, the first worm software in the computer world. Robert Tappan Morris actually said that he wrote the Morris worm “to test how big the internet world is.” But this program he made spread to a large number of computers and rendered the networks of 10% of the computers connected to the internet inoperable. He served 400 hours of social work and was fined $ 10,500.

6- Stephen Wozniak

Stephen Wozniak is both a hacker and an executive of Apple, nicknamed "Woz". Wozniak made free long-distance phone calls at a young age by hacking phone systems. Later, Wozniak founded Apple with Steve Jobs and created an event in the informatics world.

7- Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick is a famous hacker who has described himself as "the victim of his exaggerated reputation". Mitnick has been recognized as the US justice department's most wanted computer criminal. His feature films Freedom Downtime and Takedown are based on his life. Mitnick's reputation in the hacker community entered the networks of Sun, Motora and Nokia, and recorded the interviews of organizations such as NORAD and the FBI. In addition, he managed to break into Digital Equipment Corporation's computer network and steal its software. Mitnick, who was sentenced to five years in prison, was subsequently sentenced not to touch the computer for 8 months.

8- Adrian Lamo

Adrian Lamo made his name in this community as a "homeless hacker" by using internet cafes, libraries and cafes to hack attempts in these places. Lamo's most well-known hacking process is that it has managed to get into the systems of the New York Times and Microsoft. Lamo was sentenced to six months of house arrest and 2 years of staying away from the computer. He was sentenced to 65,000 dollars. Lamo also held the possibility that it had entered Yahoo !, Bank of America, Citigroup and Cingular systems.

9- Tsutomu Shimomura

Tsutomu Shimomura went down in history as the hacker who captured Kevin Mitnick. This is how Shimomura took revenge on Mitnick, who had worked with the FBI for hacking him at the time. Shimomura's ability to easily modify any mobile phone is among its well-known features.

10- Jonathan James

Jonathan James, one of the most famous hackers in the world, was arrested on hacker charges when he was 16 years old. James still carries the distinction of being the first under-18 hacker to be tried and convicted in the world. James stole $ 1.7 million of software from NASA computers by placing a backdoor program on one of the computers at the US defense department. James betrayed himself by replacing the International Space Station with humidity and temperature values. James, who was sentenced to 6 months of house arrest for being under the age of 18, was sent to military service in Alabama for breaking the house arrest rules and served there for 6 months. Authorities predicted that if James were over 18, he would have been sentenced to at least 10 years. After the surveillance period ended, James' name went through an attack on companies such as TJX, BJ's and Barnes & Noble in 2007, in which millions of credit card numbers were stolen. Although James insisted that it was unrelated to the attacks, the American secret service raided his home and family members' homes. In 2008, Jonathan James, who thought he would be punished for the crime he did not commit, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a gun and left the following note: "I really have nothing to do with the TJX incident. In any case, I have lost control over this situation, and this is the only way I can regain control. "