SecurityFocus
Aleph One
Elias Levy, aka Aleph One, was the moderator of the mailing list Bugtraq from May, 1996 until he stepped down in October, 2001. Through BugTraq, Levy has helped educate countless system administrators, network engineers and developers across the planet, and helped changed the way an entire industry does business in regards to bugs and vendor response.
In addition to his work with Bugtraq, he was also the CTO and co-founder of SecurityFocus, and author of "Smashing The Stack For Fun and Profit"which was published in Phrack Magazine issue #49. "Smashing The Stack" was the first high-quality, step-by-step introduction to stack buffer overflow vulnerabilities and exploitation, sparking numerous attacks and defenses against them.
Kevin Poulsen, Dark Dante
Before segueing into journalism, he had a notorious career in the 1980s as a cracker whose handle was Dark Dante. He worked for SRI International by day, and hacked at night. During this time, Poulsen taught himself lock picking, and engaged in a brash spree of high-tech stunts that would ultimately make him one of America's best-known cyber-criminals. Among other things, Poulsen reactivated old Yellow Page escort telephone numbers for an acquaintance that then ran a virtual escort agency.
His best-appreciated hack was a takeover of all of the telephone lines for Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller, and netting him a Porsche 944 S2.
When the FBI started pursuing Poulsen, he went underground as a fugitive. When he was featured on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries, the show's 1-800 telephone lines mysteriously crashed.
