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