Redazione RHC : 8 July 2025 09:21
We often talk about hackers, but who are the famous hackers that ever existed?
Considered by many as eccentric geniuses and computer wizards, by others they have the appearance of the “devil” or simply labeled as criminals.
Today we will talk about the greatest black hat Hackers in history, characters discreet, eccentric, solitary, crazy, obsessed with computer security, computer technology, as well as a deep curiosity.
Curiosity is morality not perfectly “in line”, which saw them take part in unprecedented computer crimes, and then serve a subsequent sentence.
Certainly the most famous is Kevin Mitnik, code name “condor”, defined by the United States Department of Justice as the “most wanted computer criminal in U.S. history”.
The story of Kevin Mitnick is so eventful that it has been the inspiration for many films such as Track Down and Freedom Downtown.
After serving a year in prison for hacking into the Digital Equipment Corporation‘s network, he was released on 3 years’ probation, but toward the end of that time, he hacked into the homeland defense’s alarm system and stole company secrets.
He was convicted of hacking Nokia, Motorola, and the Pentagon.
He pleaded guilty to seven fraud charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawful interception of wire communications.
After five years in prison that included eight months of solitary confinement, Mitnick was released. However, his talent with computers led him to become a famous computer security entrepreneur.
Another cybercrime mastermind was Gary McKinnon, a hacker accused in 2002 of conducting “the largest computer intrusion into defense-related computers of all time.”
He was accused of illegally hacking into 97 US military and NASA servers between 2001 and 2002.
The breached networks included NASA, US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the United States Air Force, as well as a Pentagon system.
It is estimated that the costs of fixing the problems caused by malware and abuse he perpetrated can be calculated between 450,000 and 700,000 dollars.
But why did he do all this? Just to get information about UFOs.
In 2012 he was denied by the United Kingdom to the American justice system, as he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome (a syndrome very common among hackers).
McKinnon is today considered one of the greatest computer minds of all time.
One of the most famous hackers, but also the first minor imprisoned for a cyber-crime at the age of 16 was Jonathan James o better known as c0mrade, of South Florida.
Imagine that he was only 15 years old at the time of his first offense and 16 years old at the time of his conviction.
Aside from various small computer crimes at school age, he hacked into computers of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a division of the United States Department of Defense by stealing usernames and passwords of users and intercepting transmitted messages, as well ashacking into 10 military computers and steal the source code of NASA’s International Space Station that allowed them to manage the temperature and humidity control inside the living space.
Jonathan did not have a good end, he was found dead on May 18, 2008, having committed suicide in the shower in his home.
Albert Gonzalezis instead remembered as the American cyber criminal specialized in credit card theft,accused of reselling over 170 million card and ATM numbers between 2005 and 2007 and the largest fraud in history.
Gonzalez and his associates used SQL Injection to deploy backdoors on multiple corporate systems in order to launch packet sniffing attacks (specifically, ARP Spoofing ) that allowed them to steal data from internal corporate networks.
His escapades included a birthday party where he spent $75,000 and the hassle of having to hand-count $340,000 after his currency counting machine broke.
Gonzalez faced three federal indictments. Thefirst was in 2008 in the Dave & Busters, The second was in 2008 in Massachusetts for the TJ Maxx case and The third in 2009 in New Jersey in relation to the Heartland Payment case. On March 25, 2010 Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
Italy also had a prominent Hacker, our Nobody, Born in 1973, or Raoul Chiesa, the most famous Italian hacker who began his career (and passion) in 1986, at just 13 years.
After a series of sensational intrusions into large organizations such as Bankitalia, IBM and AT&T, his fame, already vast in the European hacker community, has expanded internationally.
Considered by experts to be among the most gifted and intelligent hacker, has an undisputed ability to predict IT/ICT evolutions, and the social, economic and geopolitical consequences.
During a 30-year career, he took part in OWASP, ISECOM, UN, NATO, INTERPOL, quickly becoming a source of inspiration for new talent.
He then specialized in Cyber Threat Intelligence, in methodologies and process standardization.
Beyond these examples, among the hackers who have created the most problems for the American government, there are many others, such as Mafia Boy, the genius of DDoS, Vladimir Levin, specialized in bank fraud, Adriano Lamo specialized in false quotes, Kevin Poulsen, the fastest of telephone lines and Max Ray Bulter who stole 2 million credit cards.
Certainly today being a hacker (in the “ethical” sense of the term), is possible in many ways, reaching notoriety, as for example did George Hotz, famous for having created the first Jailbreak and the USB Dongle on the Playstation to install new firmware, or like Joanna Rutkowska (finally a woman), who became famous for having violated the Windows Vista Kernel with the Blue Pill, or like the greats of the past, such as Richard Greenblatt, who wrote the first computer program capable of playing chess on the first computers at MIT, or Steve Russel, who wrote the first implementations of the LISP programming language (which created a real community of hackers in tow) and the invention of the first computer video game, namely Spacewar! nel 1962.
In short, being a hacker today is possible in many ways, even without crossing that “gray” or “black” border threshold and therefore remaining completely legal.
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