THE WORLDS MOST DANGEROUS HACKERS OF ALL TIME
 1 Kevin Mitnick

We often watch movies showing hackers doing insane things on their computers, law enforcement agencies chasing them down and the news media covering every bit of it. Kevin Mitnick’s story is quite similar to any Hollywood Hacking Movie. At the time of his arrest, he was the most wanted person in relation to computer crimes.

His first brush with hacking came about when he learnt the concept of social engineering and learnt of a system to bypass the punch card system on the L.A. bus. At the age of 16, he hacked into various computer systems and copying softwars, an allegation for which he was charged 9 years later in 1988. Having made to serve twelve months in prison and three years of supervised release, Mitnick continued to hack into various systems for which fresh charges were framed against him. Mitnick fled and was on the run for more than two and a half years using cloned cell phones to hide his location. Mitnick was finally arrested in 1995 and sent to prison for 4 years in 1999.

Mitnick’s conviction gained a lot of media coverage and controversies. His prison term was in solitary confinement after the judge was convinced that Mitnick can start a nuclear war simply by whistling into a telephone system to activate NORAD’s codes. His conviction has also been blamed by over-exaggeration by the media on his capabilities and misinformation of what computers are capable of doing.

After release, Mitnick now runs an IT security company called Mitnick Security Consulting LLC that helps companies prevent hackers from infiltrating their system. He is also an advisory member and on the board for many IT and security companies

2       Gary McKinnon

Gary McKinnon has been labeled by the media for carrying out the biggest computer hack of all time and being one of the most dangerous computer hackers in the world. He has been credited with carrying out the biggest and most dangerous attack on the U.S. military computer servers and deleting vital information, softwares, data and files over a period of 1 year whilst sitting in London. His actions have costed the U.S. government more $70,000 for undoing whatever McKinnon had done. His act had left thousands of computers inoperable for a period of 24 hours. McKinnon argues that he carried out this activity to uncover information that the U.S. government may be hiding from the general public like technology and the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life.

Investigation against McKinnon started in the year of 2002 with the U.S. government demanding an extradition. McKinnon and his lawyers have long countered the extradition to the U.S citing the possibility of inhumane conditions in America, health grounds and stating the lack of necessity to face trial in the U.S. The debate of whether or not McKinnon should be extradited to the U.S. is still raging in the British parliament with the likelihood of his trial taking place within the UK.

Recently he turns into a search expert 

3  Michael Demon Calce

Today internet security is extremely stringent and websites are extremely particular about the safety of their data and their customer information. Much of today’s stringent internet security is all due to an act that Michael Demon Calce demonstrated back in the year 2000. At the time, Yahoo! was the most popular website on the internet and was the most used search engine. Calce targeted the Yahoo! systems and shut down the service for more than an hour. He also went ahead and shut down ebay, Amazon, Dell, CNN and a host of other leading websites.

Calce was later arrested when he was found bragging about his achievements on an internet chat forum and revealed certain details that was not made public and nobody else would be aware of. Since he was a minor, the Canadian courts let him off lightly with eight months of open custody, one year of probation, a small fine and a limited access to the internet. Since the American economy took a big hit with Calce’s action, IT giants took note of the fact that an underage teenager can hack into their systems which eventually paved the way for modern security measures.

Later, Calce admitted that only the Yahoo! Infiltration was a planned one and the rest were carried out on ‘auto-pilot’ mode by the software that we was using when he left his laptop on when he left for school. Calce is today a journalist, author, consultant and speaker on the topics of internet security.

4  Kevin ‘Dark Dante’ Poulsen

Kevin Poulsen has two attributes that make him stand out from the rest of the hackers. He was the first American who was made to serve an internet and computer ban after being released from prison and was had gained a specialty in hacking only through telephone lines. He first gained attention when he hacked into an L.A. radio network so that he could be the 102nd caller and would win a new Porsche. He had also reactivated all old Yellow Page escort service phone numbers so that his friend could operate a virtual escort service. When his name once came up in a TV show called Unsolved Mysteries, the 1-800 numbers of the TV station mysteriously crashed.

After being released from Prison, Kevin decided to put away his past and instead became a journalist. He is currently the senior editor for Wired News and his most notable article is where he managed to obtain a list of sex offenders from MySpace. His article led to one arrest

 5 Adrian Lamo

Many hackers do what they do to earn money and fame and are hence known as ‘Black Hat’ hackers where as those who do it to improve internet security and to prevent the Black Hats from entering are called ‘White Hat’ hackers. Adrian Lamo, on the other hand, has been known as a ‘Grey Hat’ hacker since he has done work for either side.

He first gained attention when he managed to hack into the systems of many high-profile companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, The New York Times and many others. When Lamo was arrested for breaking into their systems unauthorized, he claimed that he has done these companies a favor by highlighting the loopholes in their system and has actually saved them a lot of money. Lamo serving a 6-month detention term and was made to paid $65,000 in fine for his acts.

In 2009, Lamo once again came in the news for his alleged role in Wikileaks and his role in helping donate sensitive material to the website. Lamo later uncovered the role of a U.S. Soldier PFC Bradley Manning who has been misusing his role to collect classified data and selling it to Wikileaks. Adrian has claimed he has done so because many lives were in danger since Manning was active on-duty when he did this. Lamo has ever since been keeping a low profile and fears for his life after the Manning episode.

6  Jonathan James

Jonathan James has been credited with being the first juvenile to be incarcerated for cybercime in the United States. He was aged 16, when charged with hacking into the computer systems of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division of the Department of Defense. He installed a backdoor into the DTRA server that allowed him access to all forms of communication in and out of the computer system and numerous usernames and passwords. He also hacked in the NASA systems and stole softwares that controlled essential life sustaining equipment on-board space ships.

James was later traced and arrested but since he was a minor, faced six months of house arrest, probation till he turned 18, made to apologise to all the departments that he hacked into and was banned from using a computer for recreational use.

In 2007, when the departmental store, TJX reported a hack into their computer system and a compromise of  sensitive customer information, the Secret Service include Jonthan’s name in the list of those believed to be a part of the act. Although no evidence was found against Jonathan, he was still not dropped from the list of suspects which led him to ultimately kill himself in 2008. His suicide is believed to be caused due to tall the mental pressure he was being made to undertake for a crime he believed he was never involved in

 7   Jeanson James Ancheta

Jeanson James Ancheta became the first person to be charged with controlling large numbers of hijacked computers or botnets. Botnets were often used by hackers for malicious activity but Ancheta upped the game when he publicized his achievement and advertised his collection of bots on various internet chat rooms. He put up prices that he would charge people for renting out the machines and how many bots would one require to take down a certain kind of website. He supposedly hijacked more than half a million computers using botnets.

Ancheta was arrested in 2005 after a sting operation and was sentenced to a 5 year prison term, made to forfeit his car, all his profit and made to pay a fine for all the damages he caused.

 8   Albert Gonzales

The only motive for Albert Gonzales was to make money, a lot of it and really fast. Gonzales started a group of hackers called as the Shadowcrew group. There were more than 4,000 members on the website who aided in trafficking 1.5 million credit, debit and ATM card numbers. The website taught it’s users on how to sell these cards, create fake documents and a host of other things they needed to know. Gonzales avoided a jail term by spilling the beans on the Shadowcrew group and providing information of all this associates.

From mid-2005 to the ending of 2007 Gonzales managed to hack into the computer systems of the TJX group of retailers servers and steal over 45 million card details. He and his crew were able to pull it off by using unsecured wi-fi connections along U.S. Route 1. Gonzales was finally arrested in 2008 and is currently serving a prison term, which is due to end in 2025.

Albert Gonzales was known for having a lavish lifestyle, staying for days in fancy hotel rooms and throwing a $75,000 birthday party.

  9  Mathew Bevan and Richard Pryce

In 1996 these two guys hacked into U.S. military systems and a Korean nuclear facility. At the time, however, officials weren’t sure if the duo were infiltrating a North or South Korean facility. Luckily it was the southern, for if it had been the northern, the hacking would have been considered an act of war.

 10 Owen Walker

When he was only 17 years old, this hacker led an international hacking group that cause around $26 million in damages. He created the “Akbot” virus, which spread to 1.3 million computers, causing them to crash. Ironically, and even after pleading guilty, this hacker was never convicted, as the judge decided the boy’s future would be harmed.

11  Astra

This hacker’s real name was never revealed, but he was a 55-year-old Greek mathematician who operated between 2002-2008. He stole weapons data and 3-D imaging technology from French company The Dassault Group, which he sold for $360 million to buyers around the world. Dassault went on a world-wide manhunt, tracking Astra to an apartment in Athens, Greece.

12    Robert Tappan Morris

A computer scientist who in 1988 invented the first computer worm on the internet known as the Morris Worm. Robert Tappan Morris was the first person to have ever been convicted due to his violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of the United States. He used to be a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he was sentenced to three years of probation by the US court.

13  Kristina Svechinskaya

Kristina Vladimirovna Svechinskaya is a young Russian hacker who got involved in several plots to defraud some of the largest banks in the United States and Great Britain. She used a trojan horse to attack and open thousands of bank accounts in the Bank of America, through which she was able to skim around $3 billion in total

   14 Karl Koch

A German hacker who became famous in the 1980’s, Karl Koch was involved in the sale of hacked information from US military computers to the KGB, the main security agency of the Soviet Union. He was a member of different hacking organizations such as the CCC (Chaos Computer Club), and worked with individual hackers such as DOB or Dirk-Otto-Brezinski and Urmel. He was among the few hackers who got involved in the Cold War computer espionage incident.

15 Ehud Tenenbaum

An Israeli cracker, Ehud Tenenbaum caught the attention of the media at the young age of 19, after he led a group of young hackers that damaged the computer networks of some of the largest institutions in the United States. Young as he was, he was arrested for hacking the computer systems of the US Air Force, NASA, US Navy, The Pentagon, Knesset and MIT. He also hacked into the computers of terrorist groups based in Palestine and destroyed the websites of Islamist organization Hamas.

16 Andrew Auernheimer

More commonly known as “Weev,” Andrew Alan Escher Auernheimer was an internet troll who gained media attention because of his inflammatory, off-topic posts in several online communities and forums. An American grey hat hacker, Andrew was known for using several pseudonyms in his operations. He was the one responsible for the disruption of Amazon’s services in 2009 and for hacking New York Time’s website.

16   Rafael Nunez

Rafael Nunez was a member of the notorious hacking group World of Hell in 2011. As a member of the group, he got involved in several high profile attacks, finding websites with poor security and then defacing them with light-hearted messages. He was part of the Dan Verton book entitled “The Hacker Diaries: Confessions of Teenage Hackers” in 2002. Today, he is a notorious businessman dwelling in Venezuela

17  Julian Paul Assange

An Australian editor and publicist, Julian Paul Assenge is the founder of WikiLeaks, a site that publishes submissions of secret information from personal web accounts and news leaks. Before he became internationally acclaimed for his founding of WikiLeaks, he was a teenage hacker who published US military documents. At age 16, he joined the International Subversives group and hacked computer systems under his pseudonym, “Mendax.

  18  Chad Davis

An American hacker who operated under the pseudonym Mindphasr, Chad Davis is among the most notorious cybercriminals of the 20th century. He founded Global Hell, a syndicate of computer hackers in the United States, and authored the hacking of the websites of some of the largest organizations and corporations in the country. He was the man behind the vandalism of the homepage of The White House and the US Army with a message saying “GlobalHell will not die.”

 19  Raphael Gray

At age 19, Raphael Gray was able to hack several computer systems around the world in just a matter of one month. His mission was to gain unauthorized access to credit card information, which eventually netted him millions of dollars. Dubbed “The Bill Gates Hacker,” Gray broke into secure computer systems and published all the credit card information he accessed as part of his multimillion credit card pound mission.
20  Anonymous hacking group

 Anonymous is a hacktivist group is composed of hackers from all of the world which is still active to date it became famous for hacking the west baptist church,us govermen websites,NASA,ISIS websites,US federal reserve ,Sony,paypal,Israeli websites and many others