blackhat

Coolio

IRL Name: 
Dennis M. Moran
Biography: 

Dennis M. Moran, aka Coolio, is an American hacker who at 17, was accused of a series of smurf attacks that shut down some of the most popular sites on the web, and defaced the websites of DARE and RSA Security. While acknowledging the defacement of DARE and RSA, he flatly denied the DoS attacks on Yahoo, eBay, and others.

He was eventually arrested and plead guilty to the defacement charges, as well as unauthorized access of US Army and Air Force computer systems and was sentenced to 9 months in prison.

Mirrors of the defaced DARE and RSA sites can be found here. The DARE site is particularly amusing.

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Dark Avenger, dav

IRL Name: 
unknown
Biography: 

Dark Avenger was the pseudonym of a virus author supposedly from Sofia, Bulgaria. The name 'Dark Avenger' was derived from the string "This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988-89 Dark Avenger" found within the first virus attributed to Dark Avenger, also known as 'Dark Avenger'.

Credited for coding the most infamous polymorphic engine ever, the Mutation Engine (MtE) in 1988. The MtE was used to generate polymorphic decryptors, effectively bypassing detection by the Anti-Virus programs of the day.

It has been suggested by some that the Dark Avenger personality was actually a social experiment, and not a single person but the collaborative efforts of 2 or more individuals, namely Todor Todorov and Sarah Gordon. Todorov and Gordon were two of the only people whom Dark Avenger was believed to retain personal contact with and knew his true identity.

References

Kwyjibo, VicodinES, Alt-F11

IRL Name: 
David L. Smith
Biography: 

David L. Smith is author of the Melissa Worm, which was one of fastest spreading viruses of all time. First found in March 1999, it quickly spread to networks the world over, effectively overwhelming private, commercial, government and military computer systems and causing over $80 million in damage.

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LSDigital

IRL Name: 
Robert Matthew Bentley
Biography: 

A US-based hacker sentenced to 41 months in jail for breaking into corporate computers in Europe and making them part of a money-generating botnet. In addition, he was ordered to perform three years of supervised release once his prison time is over and to pay $65,000 in restitution, according to federal prosecutors in Pensacola, Florida.

In March, Bentley, who sometimes went by the alias LSDigital, pleaded guilty to two felony counts related to his botnet activities, which inflicted more than $150,000 worth of damage on Newell Rubbermaid. Starting as early as December 2006, Bentley and several unnamed co-conspirators installed customized bots on hundreds of the company’s computers. The malware generated so much traffic on Rubbermaid’s servers that its network stopped functioning.

New infections from the attack were being detected as recently as March, four months after Bentley was arrested. Federal agents continue to investigate the uncharged suspects. At least one of them lived in Philadelphia name unreleased

Federal prosecutors began their case after the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit in London fielded a complaint from Rubbermaid representatives in Europe. According to court documents, Bentley and his cronies generated “thousands of dollars” by installing adware from DollarRevenue.com on the infected machines.

References

Lord Digital

IRL Name: 
Patrick Karel Kroupa
Biography: 

Patrick Kroupa, aka Lord Digital, is an American hacker, writer and activist born in January, 1969 in Los Angeles. He was a member of the first pirate/cracking crew ever for Apple computers known as The Apple Mafia and other well known groups such as the Knights of Shadow. He created a phreaking and hacking toolkit for the Apple II called Phantom Access, and wrote countless papers on phreaking and hacking early Apple systems in his early teens. As a member of Legion of Doom, he was involved in The Great Hacker war. The hacker war, along with many members of LOD being arrested as a result of federal crackdowns prompted him to co-found MindVox with Dead Lord in 1991. He is also the author of "Voices in my Head, MindVox: The Overture", a compelling first-person view of the hacker underground during the "Golden Age" of cyberspace.

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r00t-y0u.org

Biography: 

(sic) a hacker at r00t-y0u.org
known for hacking a police computer and sql databased and defacing r00t-y0u.org after it was used for a sting operation due to the admin getting arrested.

The AFP has identified a person whom [sic] has attempted to access the stand-alone computer system and we are currently working with our law enforcement partners regarding this matter," the spokeswoman said.

SIC appears to have been provoked by a message published on the r00t-y0u.org site by the federal police, warning members they were under surveillance and that "all member IP addresses have been logged", with some arrests having already been made.

In two provocative messages published on anonymous document-sharing site pastebin.com, the SIC slammed the federal police for "making it sound like they can bust 'hackers', when all they have done is busted a COUPLE script kiddies". "Script kiddies" is hacker parlance for novice hackers.

The second of these messages contained several links to screenshots allegedly proving that the writer had access to the federal police's server.

These included shots of files containing fake IDs and stolen credit card numbers, as well as the federal police's server information.

The SIC then defaced the r00t-y0u.org website with the same message it had posted on the anonymous document-sharing site.

References

YTcracker

IRL Name: 
Bryce Case Jr.
Biography: 

Born in La Mirada, California, United States on August 23rd, 1982, Case gained notoriety in 1999 for defacing the website of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Atleast 40 additional websites were defaced by him including Airspace USA, the bank Altamira, Nissan Motors, Honda, and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

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Unix Terrorist, Jim Jones, the_ut, zmagic, yu0

IRL Name: 
Stephen Huntley Watt
Biography: 

Stephen Watt is a computer hacker who went by Jim Jones and then Unix Terrorist (the_ut for short). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, that hacker was part of a band of self-proclaimed black hats that opposed the publication of security vulnerabilities and resisted the hacking scene’s shift from recreational network intrusions to legitimate security research. Under the rubric Project Mayhem, the gang managed to hack into the accounts of a number of prominent “white hat” hackers and publish their private files and e-mails. At the 2002 DefCon hacker conference, Watt took the stage with two friends to personally share some of the hacked e-mails.

He was arrested and convicted of writing customized code to help Gonzalez breach networks, including the “blabla” sniffer, which was stored on a server in Latvia and used to steal tens of millions of credit and debit cards from TJX in 2006 and from Dave & Buster’s in 2007. According to court documents, the Secret Service recovered 27.5 million stolen numbers from a server in Ukraine and 16.3 million numbers from a server in Latvia.

The breach cost TJX $200 million according to its 2009 SEC filing.

“I figured out his name years ago, Stephen Huntley Watt, and then the guy wound up getting indicted on the TJ Maxx thing,” says former hacker Kevin Mitnick.

In a profile in Phrack Magazine in 2007, “Unix Terrorist” reflected on the old days:
“Looking back on my involvement in computers, I am very happy that the peak of my activity occurred right during the turn of the 20th century,” he wrote. “Hacking was no longer as simple as manual labor (wardialing, etc.) but finding vulnerabilities and writing exploits and tools was not exactly as tedious and prohibitively time-consuming as it is currently. To say that I would rather commit seppuku than adapt to the challenges of a changing world by auditing code for SQL injection vulnerabilities and client-side browser exploits is not an exaggeration.”

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Li’l Hacker

IRL Name: 
Matthew Weigman
Biography: 

A legally blind Massachusetts phone hacker who is considered to be one of the best phone hackers alive. Caught the attention of the FBI in 2005 when at 15 years old staged a hostage hoax that sent police to Colorado resident Richard Gasper's house when his daughter refused to have phone sex with him.

In April 2008, William Smith, a Verizon Security Investigator would find a phoneline using a Texas woman's information that was actually going to Weigman's East Boston apartment setup and turn it off. Weigman was able to turn it back on and proceeded to start harassing Smith with phone calls by socially engineering phone company employees into sharing Smith’s billing records and using Caller ID spoofing to make him think somebody was returning his calls. On May 18th 2008, Weigman traveled to Smith's New Hampshire home with his older brother and party line friend Sean Paul Benton. After Smith found out who he was, he called the police due to feeling intimidated who proceeded to arrest Weigman.

On June 26th, 2009, Weigman was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison after a guilty plea on computer intrusion and witness intimidation charges.

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resili3nt

IRL Name: 
Jeanson James Ancheta
Biography: 

Ancheta was the first person to be arrested by FBI agents for running a botnet as a part of 'Operation Bot Roast' in November 2005. On May 9th, 2006 he pleaded guilty to 4 felony charges under United States Code Section 1030: Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers and was sentenced to 5 years in prison, forfeiture of a 1993 BMW and more than $58,000 in profit. In addition he was ordered to pay restitution of $15,000 to the US Federal Government for infecting military computers.

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