The Cyber Crime Hall of Fame 145
DigitalDame2 writes "Not all hackers are bad guys, but a few fall prey to the dark side and use their talents for evil — not good. In compiling this list of the craziest cyber crimes, PC Mag looked for a few things: ingenuity (had it been done before?), scope (how many computers, agencies, companies, sites, etc. did it affect?), cost (how much in monetary damages did it cause?), and historical significance (did it start a new trend?). Read on about famous hackers John Draper, Robert Morris, Kevin Poulsen, and others."
Re:Must be said! (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.mitnicksecurity.com/ [mitnicksecurity.com]
Already been done and now he's doing quite well for himself. He was wrong for doing what he did, and yes so to was the government.
However he is now doing fairly well for himself with his books and appearances on TV. I think AMW last year he was working to help profile a computer hacker.
You want him free? Done and Done.
Re:I know it's a pet peeve (Score:1, Informative)
not to mention their blatant misrepresentation of hackers. These guys were more aptly termed as crackers since they used their skills for malicious purposes.
They may have been hackers initially, but their move to the dark side changed that. I just think it gives people a warped idea of what a real hacker really does.
Re:Unsolved Cyber Crime (Score:1, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WANK_(computer_worm) [wikipedia.org]
Look at the references (heck, read the entire book), for some information about this worm.
Re:They missed Jeffery Ward, the first one (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting that he had to pay $305,000 for a plotting program in 1971.
One of ISD's competitive advantages in the early 1970s is that they offered remote plotting, using CALCOMP pen plotters, when almost nobody else did. Engineering companies liked this. The remote plotting was implemented by emulating a UNIVAC 1004 on a very small minicomputer, then hooking up a plotter which was fed from the "output card punch" stream. Since the printer/plotter message protocol had checking and retransmit, this could produce clean plots, unlike competing systems that used async modems of the period, which had no checking.
All this stuff was much harder back then. The mainframes were 1.2 MIPS machines; the remote minicomputers were something like 0.1 MIPS with 8K of memory.
Re:I know it's a pet peeve (Score:1, Informative)
Additionally:
-"Hacker" doesn't share a definition with a slang racist term
-"Cracker" isn't a term known by the general public
-"Cracker" implies illegal activity, which isn't correct until they're found guilty, and as such its use may bring lawsuits if not correctly used with "allegedly"
All good reasons to use the word "hacker" instead of "cracker". In a society where "lol" is used in place of punctuation, punctuation is used where it shouldn't be, words are no longer spelled the same as any dictionary, and whole words are often replaced with single letters, acronyms, or numbers, YOU want to get your panties in a twist over the correct use of the word "hacker" instead of "cracker"?
Saying "hacker" instead of "cracker" no more implies all hackers are malicious, than saying "an African-American robbed a 7-11" implies all black people are robbers. Except of course, if you're racist and already have that notion in your mind.