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When you hear about hackers, you think that they are people involved in some kind of online illegal activities. But the truth is that there are two different types of hackers in the world just like we have two different faces of a coin. There are white hat hackers who help organizations in finding loopholes in a system and clear them out and then there are black hat hackers who are involved in activities that are categories as cyber crime.
But most of us don’t know that hackers are people who contributed a lot to bring many things to life sometimes as a team and sometimes all by themselves.
Black hat hackers are responsible for illegal activities like credit card theft and many more things while White hat hackers used their knowledge to do good for the society. Without them, we won’t be having half of the computer related stuff that we have today and they have contributed a lot to make computer world even better.
So, Here’s the list of 12 hackers who made history by achieving something different in the world of computing.
1. Konrad Zuse
Konrad Zuse was the world’s first known hacker. Not really in a sense how present hackers work but it is because of him that the world has programmable computers.
Konrad built world’s first programmable computer i.e. Z3. The Z3 was complete and became operational in May of 1941. He also made the world’s first commercial computer as well. He is also known for designing first high level programming language which is known as Plankalkül.
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2. John Draper
John Draper was a computer genius and hacker. He is well known among computer security and hacking community. He hacked into telephones when they were managed by an automated system which was managed by specific frequencies that he exploited to make long distance or free international calls.
This method is called “Phreaking” and the famous phreaking tool was a whistle which came in a Cap’n Crunch cereal box. With the help of the whistle and the frequency at which it created sound, he created yet another amazing tool named as blue box which could produce more number tones which were used by many telephone companies at that time.
3. Gary McKinnon
Gary McKinnon was obsessed with UFOs and this was proved when he tried and succeeded in infiltrating 97 US and NASA computers. He used his girlfriend’s aunt’s computer in London to do this infiltration and he also put up a small notice on the websites which read, “YOUR SECURITY IS CRAP!”
4. Adrian Lamo
Adrian hacked into Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and even The New York Times.
He was arrested for his deeds but later the hacker tag helped him grab the American Threat Analyst tag. He later helped FBI in getting hold of Bradley Manning who is a Wikileaks suspect but Lamo went missing/hiding. Weird, right?
5. Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak who is also known as Woz co-founded Apple and designed Apple I and Apple II computers which contributed to the personal computer revolution. He also made a blue box after Draper shared the design of his Blue box during a meet. Steve Jobs saw the flare of marketing potential and they both together started Apple Computer. Steve Wozniak net worth is about us $150 Million in 2014 according to stats.
6. Robert Tappan Morris
Robert Tappan Morris who is famous for his Morris worm that he coded in late 1980’s. He is also the first person to be convicted under the new laws of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He also co-founded Y combinator which funds startups around the world. The worm due to flaw in its algorithm copied itself excessively which lead back to Morris and infected almost 5000 to 6000 computers. He is currently working as Professor in MIT.
7. Mark Abene
Mark Abene who is also known as the Phiber Optik in the cyber world. He was a member of the hacker group named “Mass Destruction”. He often had an eye on the AT&T systems. His house was searched and all the equipment was seized when AT&T systems were crashed leaving outage of services for approximately 60,000 subscribers for a period of 9 hours and Abene was blamed.
Later it is found that the fault is on AT&T side only. He is the first hacker who served a year in federal prison.
8. Kevin Lee Poulsen
Kevin Lee Poulsen who was known by the name Dark Dante. He was a notorious hacker who was famous for his hacking activity of taking over all telephone lines to make him the 102 caller as the KIIM-FM promised to gift a brand new Porche to 102 caller. He became a fugitive when FBI started searching for him.
All the telephone lines are crashed when he was featured on NBC’s Unsolved Mysteries. He along withAaron Swartz developed secure drop which is a platform for secure communicate between journalists and sources. He is currently senior editor at Wired magazine.
9. Kevin Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick is a famous hacker who made into FBI’s most wanted list. He is also know by other names The Condor and The Dark Side Hacker. He is the master of Social Engineering with which he hacked the human minds. He broke into a network with his social engineering skills and copied a proprietary software for which he was charged and convicted. He served a total of 58 months in prison for the charges against him. He now runs his own security firm Mitnick Security Consulting LLC.
10. Tsutomu Shimomura
As we mentioned before that not all the hackers are black hat and Tsutomu Shimomura falls under white hat hacker community. He was known for tracing Kevin Mitnick with which FBI arrested Mitnick. Shimomura’s personal information was stolen and published online by Mitnick which made him to come up with a trace dialing technique which helped him to track down the location of Mitnick.
11. Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman was a student from MIT. He is the president of free software foundation. He is the one who supported Open Source and he fought back when MIT installed a password system in CSE department. Stallman created GNU General Public License and GNU operating system which is completely Unix Compatible. He has received 15 Doctorates and professorships as of 2014.
12. Linus Torvalds
Linus is another white hat hacker who believed in Open Source. He is the one who developed Linux Kernel which is the most popular kernel source for operating systems. He started creating Linux on his PC as a college project. The PC was powered by an Intel 80386 he merged it into GNU project under GNU GPL. He also programmed his own text editor too. Linux is one of the most secure operating systems available.
This is our list of 12 dangerous hackers who made history and changed the way we use things. They changed the computer world and moulded it into a nice play which we are enjoying right now.
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