Chris Lamprecht is regarded as the first person to be banned from the Internet. After being sentenced to 70 months in prison for money laundering, Lamprecht was also given the unusual punishment of no access to the Internet until 2003.
Under the order of Judge Sam Sparks of the US District Court in 1995, Lamprecht was ordered to 70 months in the Federal Correctional Institution. Though a known computer hacker, the 24 year old was never tried, nor pled guilty for computer related crimes, making it the more unusual that he was not allowed to access the Internet. In 2002 Judge Sam Sparks released Lamprecht from his term of supervised release, effectively lifting his Internet ban as well.
Chris Lamprecht co-authored the computer wardialer program ToneLoc in the 1990s with Mucho Maas, and he currently works at Indeed.com.
David L. Smith (born c.1968) is the writer of the Melissa worm. In March 1999, the then 31-year-old programmer released the Melissa worm in Aberdeen Township, New Jersey by deliberately posting an infected document to an alt.sex Usenet newsgroup from a stolen AOL account. It is believed that Smith named the virus after a lap-dancer he had known in Florida. He called himself Kwyjibo, but was shown to be identical to macrovirus writers VicodinES and Alt-F11, who had several Word-files with the same characteristic Globally Unique Identifier (GUID), a serial number that was earlier generated with the network card MAC address as a component. The virus forwards itself to the first 50 addresses in a person’s Outlook address book. It is also known to damage documents by putting in the text, “twenty-two, plus triple-word score, plus fifty points for using all my letters. Game’s over. I’m outta here”, a reference to The Simpsons episode Bart the Genius, from where the name 'kwyjibo' also originates.
Companies such as Microsoft, Intel, Lockheed Martin, and Lucent Technologies were forced to shut down their e-mail gateways due to the vast amount of e-mail the virus was generating. The Melissa virus was the most costly computer outbreak to date, causing more than $80 million in damages to North American businesses. In December of the same year, Smith pleaded guilty to creating and releasing the virus. He was one of the first people to ever be prosecuted for writing a virus. The sentence, originally ten years (of a maximum forty year sentence) in a United States federal prison, was reduced to twenty months and a $5,000 fine when Smith began working undercover with the FBI shortly after his capture. Initially only working eighteen hours per week, Smith was soon bumped up to a forty hour work week. He was tasked with gaining connections among authors of new viruses, keeping an ear to the ground for software vulnerabilities, mitigating damage caused by these nefarious activities, and contributing to the capture of the perpetrators.
The task of tracing the worm to its originator was accomplished through the efforts of security analyst Jonathan James, who collaborated with the FBI on the case and who also traced the authors of the ILOVEYOU worm. Fredrik Björck also contributed to the identification of a website owned by VicodinES, later identified as David L. Smith.
Chris Goggans, who used the name Erik Bloodaxe in honor of the Viking king of a similar name, is a founding member of the Legion of Doom group, and a former editor of Phrack Magazine. Loyd Blankenship, aka The Mentor, described Goggans/Bloodaxe as "the best hacker I ever met".
Goggans was raided by the US Secret Service on March 1, 1990, but was not charged.
But in a phone call intercepted by the Australian Federal Police as part of an investigation into Australian hacker Phoenix (Nahshon Even-Chaim) Goggans was heard planning a raid in which the pair would steal source code and developmental software from Execucom, an Austin, Texas, software and technology company, and sell it to the company’s rivals.
In the call, recorded on February 22, 1990 and later presented in the County Court of Victoria as evidence against Even-Chaim, Goggans and Even-Chaim canvassed how much money they could make from such a venture and how they would split fees from Execucom’s competitors. During the call Goggans provided Even-Chaim with a number of dial-up access numbers to Exexucom’s computers, commenting: "There are serious things I want to do at that place", and "There’s stuff that needs to happen to Execucom.". While there is no evidence that Goggans and Even-Chaim acted on this discussion, Goggans' statement of his intentions calls into question the nobility of his hacking ethics.
According to Michelle Slatella and Joshua Quittner in their 1995 book Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, Goggans was in 1990 in the process of establishing his own computer security company in Texas. They claim he planned to recruit companies as clients by hacking them and showing how vulnerable their systems were to other hackers.
Currently, Goggans is president of SDI, Inc., a Virginia-based corporation providing information security consulting.
A dick who liked to shoot his mouth off and threaten people on conference bridges. MOD was able to get his personal information from Fry Guy by offering to let him know how they kept getting his phone number (no matter how many times he changed it).
Used to say threats like, "oh Im going to get your phone number....oh Im going to Remob you with a DAMT...you better phear me !"
Fry Guy was more of a social engineer than a real hacker. Fry Guy got his alias interestingly enough, by acquiring the password to McDonalds' mainframe computers from a McDonalds' manager. Once he was in, he quickly increased the salaries of some of his friends who worked there.
Fry Guy then moved on to credit card scamming. He would request cash advances from Western Union with stolen credit card numbers. As a policy, Western Union would call the number on the credit card to double-check the identity of the caller. Fry Guy would re-route the calls to his phone - effectively making him the card owner. Most of this activity took place while he was a meager 16 years old.
On July 22, 1990 as his parents watched, Fry Guy was arrested by the Secret Service. On September 14, 1990 Fry Guy was sentenced to 400 hours community service and 44 months of probation. All in all, Fry Guy had made over $6,000 off of Western Union alone.
Fry Guy is also partly blamed for letting authorities and the phone companies know that there were hackers listening in on conversations, setting up their own phone numbers and accounts, and re-routing calls. He had actually called up the phone company threatening that the Legion of Doom would crash the phone system. Not surprisingly, this is what led to his arrest and later the war on the Legion of Doom.
Where some see hacking as the gaining of knowledge, Tabas used his knowledge for personal profit. He worked for a plastic card company that made blanks for credit card companies, and decided to liberate 1,350 of these for future sale. All was well until Steve Dahl agreed to take a reduced sentence in return for arranging a sting. Dahl was given an embossing machine and told to meet Tabas in a bugged hotel room. The rest is history.
Born 1960
Probably published more phreaking documents than all others combined in the 1980s. Indicted for his txtfile describing the e911 phone system.
1990, Neidorf was facing 31 years in jail after being arrested and charged with receiving a document stolen from Bell South, and with publicly distributing it online. Charges were essentially dropped as the document in question was more of a memorandum and not actual source code.
Fluffi Bunni (AKA Fluffy Bunny), infamous web site defacer, was arrested 29 April 2003 in London by Scotland Yard while attending InfoSecurity Europe 2003. His real name is Lynn Htun and his first public defacement was a Linux box belonging to hogeschoolnederland.nl. He embarrassed leading Internet security organizations by breaking into their own computers and replacing Web pages with a message that "Fluffi Bunni ownz you" and a digital photograph of a pink rabbit at a keyboard. The attacks, which began in June 2000, lasted about 18 months, then stopped mysteriously and created one of the Internet's most significant hacker whodunits in years. Victims have included the Washington-based SANS Institute, which offers security training for technology professionals; Security Focus, now owned by Symantec Corp.; and Attrition.org, a site run by experts who formerly tracked computer break-ins. Other victims included McDonald's Corp. and the online security department for Exodus Communications Inc., now part of London-based Cable & Wireless plc.
Levin is a biochemist from St Petersburg, is a cult figure of Russian cybercrime, and is considered to be one of the fathers of hacking in Russia.
Levin was delivered into U.S. custody in September 1997, and tried in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. In his plea agreement he admitted to only one count of conspiracy to defraud and to stealing US$3.7 million. In February 1998 he was convicted and sentenced to three years in jail, and ordered to make restitution of US$240,015. Citibank claimed that all but US$400,000 of the stolen US$10.7 million had been recovered.
After Levin was convicted, a different hacking group from St Petersburg claimed that they were the ones to originally gain access to Citibank — which they then sold to Levin for $100.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police first noticed Mafia boy when he started claiming in IRC chatrooms that he was responsible for the attacks. He became the chief suspect when he claimed to have brought down Dell's website, an attack that had not been publicized at that time