Hacking for Fun and Profit

Usually the person who is listed as the number one hacker is a man who has gone straight. His name is Kevin Mitnick. He seems to have started his hacker career at the tender age of about 16 years old. His first computer hack took place in 1979 when he broke into the Digital Equipment Corporations computer system. He copied their operation system development software and in 1988 finally got convicted for it. When he was serving his sentence, he was on supervised release for three years, but this didn’t stop him. During that time, he hacked into Pacific Bell and got their voice mail. A warrant was issued for him and after two years on the run and hundreds of hacks into other systems he was arrested again. He was charged with 14 counts of fraud. He served over five years in prison. Mitnick finally managed to turn his life around and today he runs Mitnick Security Consulting LLC and is part owner of KnowBe4 another security related company.

Adrian Lamo is another famous hacker who appears on many of the most famous hacker lists. He got his start in 2001 at 20 years old. Apparently, he didn’t like a Reuters article so he was said to have used a content management tool at Yahoo to modify that article. He added a fake quote to the article which then credited former Attorney General John Ashcroft with it. In 2002 Lamo hacked The New York Times intranet and added his name to a list of expert sources and then began researching public figures. Lamo became known as the Homeless Hacker because he often had no address.  When he was 29 years old it was found he had Asperger’s Disorder which is a mild form of Autism. Many hackers seem to have it and it has gained the name the Geek Disease and there are those who blame the disease for this behavior.

Another famous hacker is Albert Gonzalez. Gonzalez got involved with a computer gang. It was named Soupnazi. I don’t know if this name had anything to do with the famous soup restaurant in New York City where the owner earned this name or not. He moved on to a criminal site known as Shadowcrew and became its moderator. His reputation grew and he became know as one of the best hackers. He eventually was arrested for debit card fraud and to avoid jail time he turned evidence on his fellow hackers. He actually became a paid informant. What the law didn’t know was he was still busy committing criminal acts and stole 180 million accounts from many different companies. He was sentenced in 2015 for his deeds.

Jeanson James Ancheta was a different type of hacker. He stole nothing. Before I go further let me explain what a bot is. A bot is a piece of software which can be used in many different ways. One way is to send adverts to computers, it can also send viruses. What Ancheta did was sort of ingenious. He infected over 400,000 computers using bots and then rented them to advertising companies and accepted money to install bots or adware. Bots can be used to monitor a system. He was the first hacker to be sent to jail for the way he used bot technology.

Michael Calce was the hacker which made companies and people realize how easy it was to disrupt a website in the year 2000. The most powerful search engine at the time was Yahoo and he brought it down to its knees. Within a very short period of time he also crashed Dell, eBay, CNN and Amazon using what is known as a denial of service attack. That is where so many computers are trying to get onto a website, they crash it. Because of what he did some companies began to straighten their cyber security.

Another story about a hacker who eventually was one of the ten best known and reinvented himself is Kevin Poulsen. Today he is a writer for Wired magazine, but he wasn’t always such a law-abiding citizen. In 1983 he was caught hacking in ARPANET, the Pentagon’s computer network, but was only given a warning due to his age. This warning didn’t stop him and in 1988, among other hacks, he was able to fix a contest and made himself become the 102nd caller winning a new Porsche and a vacation and $20,000. He was arrested and barred from computing for three years.

What is strange about hacking is most law enforcement agents don’t understand why it is so popular. Yes, there are criminal elements who only use it for gain, but there are a lot of people who actually enjoy hacking. The hacking is the challenge for them and they could care less about monetary gain. They either want to be able to say they hacked a certain site and got away with it, or they were able to find certain information such as UFO related which was being kept secret which proves UFOs are alien or some such thing. Hacking holds a fascination for some people and if it wasn’t for that there would be a lot less hackers in the world. Many hackers begin their hacking career in a less noticed way, such as breaking into games they own to see if they can do it. If they don’t realize what they are doing is wrong somewhere along the way they just continue on to bigger and better hacking. Some even get hacking jobs with the government which allows them all the pleasures of hacking without breaking the law. If someone could figure out how to take the fun factor out of hacking it would certainly cut down on their numbers.