Tsutomu Shimomura

 (1964 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

One of the persons that tracked down Kevin Mitnick in 1994. Tsutomu has worked for the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, FBI, Air Force and the NSA.

Neill Michael Clift

 - 1    [email]

If there ever was a person that met the true definition of a White Hat, Neill Clift would be that person. Instead of making his findings of bugs (in the DEC/VMS operating system) open to the public, Neill would report (sell) them directly to DEC. He would also have a few unpleasant online run-ins with criminal computer hacker, Kevin Mitnick. Neill currently works for Microsoft.

Mark Abene

 (1972 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Phiber Optik' - Hacker and phreaker who was a onetime member of LOD and founder of MOD. Inspired thousands of teenagers around the country to "study" the internal workings of the United States phone system. Served one year in jail for hacking.

John Lee

 - 1

'Corrupt' - Hacker and phreaker who was a member of Masters of Deception (MOD), a New York-based hacker group. Infamous for its skill, MOD successfully controlled all the major telephone networks as well as controlling large parts of the backbone of the radiply emerging Internet.

Steven G. Steinberg

 - 1    [website]

'Frank Drake' - Author and a member of the hacker/phreaker group called Legion of Doom (LOD), which was an influential hacker group from the 1980s and 1990s.

Dave Buchwald

 (1970 - )   - 1

'Bill From RNOC' - Was a member of the hacker/phreaker group called Legion of Doom (LOD), which was an influential hacker group from the 1980s and 1990s.

Patrick Karel Kroupa

 (1969 - )   - 1

'Lord Digital' - Was a member of the hacker/phreaker group called Legion of Doom (LOD), which was an influential hacker group from the 1980s and 1990s.

Bruce Fancher

 (1971 - )   - 1

'Dead Lord' - Was a member of the hacker/phreaker group called Legion of Doom (LOD), which was an influential hacker group from the 1980s and 1990s.

Chris Christian Goggans

 (1969 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Erik Bloodaxe' - Onetime editor of Phrack and a member of the hacker/phreaker group called Legion of Doom (LOD), which was an influential hacker group from the 1980s and 1990s.

Peter Jay Salzman

 - 1,2    [website]

'Thomas Covenant' - Legion of Doom (LOD) member, Peter created a non-existant central office in New York City to get nearly a million dollars worth of Bell system tech journals and Bell operating procedures. He also used the virtual central office to get accounts into just about every switch, LMOS, COSMOS system in New York telephone. Peter was finally arrested for hacking in 1988 and sentenced to 6 months incarceration, $10,000 restitution, $2,000 fine, 3 years probation and no use of a computer for 5 years.

Corey A. Lindsly

 (1967 - )   - 1,2

'Mark Tabas' - Legion of Doom (LOD) member, Lindsly was the major ringleader in a computer hacker organization, known as the "Phone Masters", whose ultimate goal was to own the telecommunications infrastructure from coast-to-coast. The group penetrated the systems of AT&T, British Telecom., GTE, MCI WorldCom, Sprint, Southwestern Bell and systems owned by state and federal governmental agencies, to include the Nation Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer. They broke into credit-reporting databases belonging to Equifax Inc. and TRW Inc. They entered Nexis/Lexis databases and systems of Dun & Bradstreet. They had access to portions of the national power grid, air-traffic-control systems and had hacked their way into a digital cache of unpublished phone numbers at the White House. A federal court granted the FBI permission to use the first ever "data tap" to monitor the hackers' activities. Corey later was sentenced to forty-one months imprisonment and ordered to pay $10,000 to the victim corporations.

Kevin Lee Poulsen

 (1965 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Dark Dante' - Hacker & phreaker, now writes for Security Focus. Poulsen, a native of Pasadena, California is a former programmer, network administrator and hacker. Kevin had burrowed deep into the giant switching networks of Pacific Bell, exploring and exploiting nearly every element of its computers. His forays led to a now infamous incident with KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. In 1990 the station ran the "Win a Porsche by Friday" contest, with a $50,000 Porsche given to the 102nd caller. Kevin and his associates, stationed at their computers, seized control of the station's 25 telephone lines, blocking out all calls but their own. Then he dialed the 102nd call -- and later collected his Porsche 944. The hacker also uncovered FBI and national security wiretaps throughout California, including taps on the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. Some of Poulsen's actions turned into the first ever espionage case against a hacker, the charges were later dropped. Kevin pled guilty to breaking into computers to get the names of undercover businesses operated by the FBI. In 1995 Poulsen was sentenced to 51 months imprisonment.

Ron Austin

 - 1,2,3,4,5

Kevin Poulsen's longtime friend and fellow hacker.

Mark K. Lottor

 (1965 - )    1,2    [website]

Former roommate of Kevin Poulsen, Mark was an avid cell phone enthusiast, who had a few run-ins with hacker Kevin Mitnick. Mark has also authored four RFCs (check out the RFC on SFTP, port 115).

Kevin David Mitnick

 (1963 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Condor' - A criminal computer hacker and phreaker who served a 5-year prison term. Widely considered the 'most famous hacker in history'. Broke into Digital Equipment Corp., Motorola, Nokia Mobile Phones, Fujitsu, Novell, NEC, Sun Microsystems, the University of Southern California, the Well and Colorado SuperNet, just to name a few. Also broke into computers run by Dan Farmer and Mark Lottor. Mitnick was first suspected of hacking into Tsutomu's computers in 1994 but an unknown (? Jonathan Zanderson) Israeli hacker and friend to Mitnick was later suspected. The Israeli hacker was thought to be looking for the Oki cell phone disassembler written by Shimomura and wanted by Mitnick.

Lewis De Payne

 (1963 - )   - 1,2,3,4    [website]

'Lew Payne' - Friend to Kevin Mitnick since the late 70s. Together they explored and manipulated the telephone network as Los Angeles' most notorious phone phreaks.

Susan Lynn Headley

 - 1

'Susan Thunder' - One of the few female phreakers/hackers and member of the Roscoe Gang. Members included Kevin Mitnick and Lewis De Payne.

RFP

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Rain Forest Puppy' - Famous for finding and publishing many vulnerabilities in Microsoft servers (IIS).

Dan J. Farmer

 (1963 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    

Was in charge of the technical aspects of computer and network security for Silicon Graphics, Inc., Sun Microsystems and most recently EarthLink. Co-authored SATAN (Security Administrator's Tool for Analyzing Networks) and wrote COPS (Computer Oracle and Password System).

Wietse Zweitze Venema

 (1951 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [homepage - email]

Co-authored SATAN, he also wrote TCP Wrappers (tcpd) and created the Postfix e-mail server.

Edward W. Felten

 (1963 - )   - 1,2,3    [homepage - email]

A Princeton University team cracks SDMI music encryption scheme(s), after SDMI offers a challenge. Professor Felten decided to publish a paper on their findings. Legal threat made by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Felten decided not to offer his teams findings. Buh-bye free speech.

Aviel D. Rubin

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website - email]

Senior Technical Staff Member at AT&T Labs, Research in the secure systems research department. Helped reveal weaknesses in the underlying cipher that provides security for the 802.11 wireless LAN protocol.

Matt Blaze

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website - email]

Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Research Scientist at AT&T. Discovered a serious flaw in the U.S. Government's "Clipper" encryption system and co-designed swIPe, the predecessor of IPSEC.

Ian Avrum Goldberg

 (1973 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

In 1997 as a graduate student at the University of Californial at Berkeley he cracked RSA Data Security's 40-bit crypto code in just three and a half hours using a network of 250 workstations.

Elias Levy

 (1974 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [email]

Elias is the moderator of Bugtraq, one of the most widely read security mailing lists on the Internet. He was recently named one of The 10 Most Important People of the Decade by Network Computing.

Marcus J. Ranum

 (1962 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [website - email]

Author of several major Internet firewall products, including the DEC SEAL, the TIS Gauntlet, and the TIS Internet Firewall Toolkit.

Bruce Schneier

 (1963 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [weblog - email]

Cryptography expert and Counterpane's chief technology officer. Designed the Blowfish and Twofish algorithms.

Robert Tappan Morris, Jr.

 (1965 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

Cornell University graduate student who accidentally unleashed an Internet worm in 1988. Thousands of computers were infected and subsequently crashed.

Peiter Zatko

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Dr. Mudge' - Onetime L0pht member and now Vice President of Research and Development for @Stake.

Space Rogue

 - 1,2,3,4,5

'Space Rogue' - Founder of the Hacker News Network (HNN).

Mike Schiffman

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Route' - Onetime editor-in-chief of Phrack Magazine. Mike currently works for Cisco.

Patrick W. Gregory

 - 1

'MostHated' - The co-leader of Global Hell. Was sentenced in federal court to 26 months imprisonment, three years supervised release, and was ordered to pay $154,529 in restitution.

Eric Burns

 (1980 - )   - 1,2,3,4

'Zyklon' - Global Hell member, was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment, 3 years of supervised release, and was ordered to pay $36,240 in restitution.

Fyodor

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Fyodor' - Nmap author.

Chris Lamprecht

 - 1,2,3,4

'Minor Threat' - Chris Lamprecht becomes first person banned from the Internet. Chris was sentenced for a number of crimes to which he pled guilty. The crimes involved the theft and sale of Southwestern Bell circuit boards. In the early 1990s Chris wrote a program called ToneLoc (Tone Locator), a phone dialing program modeled on the program used in the movie WarGames to find open modem lines in telephone exchanges.

David Dittrich

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [homepage - email]

Dave Dittrich is a senior security engineer and consultant for the University of Washington. He was one of the first to identify distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack programs in 1999. Dee-Dos expert.

Richard Thieme

 (1944 - )   - 1,2,3,4    [website - email]

Writes some good articles on the computer security culture.

Eric C. Corley

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Emmanuel Goldstein' - Editor-in-chief of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and hosts a weekly radio program in New York called "Off the Hook."

Dennis Moran

 - 1,2,3,4,5

'Coolio' - Defaced some websites including RSA Security Inc. and dare.com. Was sentenced to nine months in jail and fined $15,000.

Raphael Gray

 - 1,2,3,4,5

'Cureador' - Welsh hacker who pled guilty to the online theft of about 26,000 credit cards and posting them online during February of 2000. Was sentenced to a three-year community rehabilitation order with psychiatric care.

Jerome T. Heckenkamp

 (1980 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

'SK8' - Allegedly hacked eBay, E*Trade, Lycos, Exodus Communications, Juniper Networks and Qualcomm using the name 'MagicFX'. Onetime Los Alamos National Laboratory employee. Heckenkamp was sentenced to 8 months in prison and 8 months of electronic monitoring and home confinement, for gaining unauthorized access into and damaging computer systems while a graduate student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin in 1999.

MafiaBoy

 - 1

'MafiaBoy' - Executed denial-of-service attacks (Dee-DoS) on web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon.com, ZDNet, CNN, e-Bay and Dell.com on Feb. 7, 2000 which caused an estimated $1.7 billion USD in damages. He pled guilty and was sentenced to eight months in a youth detention center.

John Draper

 - 1,2,3,4    [website]

'Cap'n Crunch' - He let people know about making free phone calls using a plastic prize whistle found in a cereal box. Cap'n Crunch helped introduced generations of hackers to the glorious world of phone phreaking.

Lance Spitzner

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

Author of many quality White Papers.

William "Bill" R. Cheswick

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [homepage - email]

AT&T firewall guru.

Jonathan Littman

 - 1,2,3,4    [book - book]

Author of 'The Fugitive Game' and 'The Watchmen'.

Robert Tappan Morris, Sr.

 - 1

Chief Scientist of the National Security Agency. Legendary for security breaches at Bell Labs before joining NSA. Now retired. He invented a trap-door encryption algorithm which was used for encrypting passwords stored in the /etc/password file of Unix computers.

Georgi Guninski

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website - email]

Georgi is a security researcher from Bulgaria who has discovered over 50 Internet Explorer bugs.

Tatu Ylonen

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [email]

In 1995, Ylonen invented Secure Shell (SSH) for remote logins.

Michael Bruce Sterling

 (1954 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5    [book - email]

His 1992 book The Hacker Crackdown is non-fiction, describing the law enforcement and computer-crime activities that led to the start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1990. Bruce is widely considered to be one of the original founders of the early 1980s creators of the pessimistic and dystopian cyberpunk genre of science fiction.

Brian Martin

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Jericho', 'Cult Hero' - Founder of Attrition.org.

Ken Williams

 - 1

Founder of Packet Storm Security.

Mixter

 - 1,2,3,4

''Mixter' - Authored Tribe Flood Network (TFN). The tool that was used by the Canadian hacker named 'Mafia Boy' in the Dee-Dos attacks of 2000.

David Litchfield

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

'Mnemonix' - Author of some really great papers and books on computer security.

Ed Cummings

 - 1,2,3,4,5

'Bernie S.' - A hacker who was prosecuted for having items which "could be used" for illegal activity.

Jonathan James

 (1983 - )   - 1

'c0mrade' - A teen-ager who broke into a Pentagon computer system that monitors threats from nuclear weapons.

Herwart Holland-Moritz

 (1951 - 2001)   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Wau Holland' - Legendary German hacker and co-founder of the Chaos Computer Club.

Karl Werner Lothar Koch

 (1965 - 1989)   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Hagbard Celine' - A young, talented, German hacker that mysteriously died in 1989 at the age of 23. In 1998 a film titled '23' was released which depicts the life of Karl and his friends. Picture 4 shows a true phreaker/hacker in action.

Boris Floricic

 (1972 - 1998)   - 1,2

'Tron' - German hacker and member of the CCC (Chaos Computer Club). In 1998 Boris was found dead in a Neukoelln, Berlin park. Ruled a suicide, he was found hanged with a belt.

Jon Lech Johansen

 - 1,2,3,4,5

Jon Johansen is one of the three founding members of MoRE (Masters of Reverse Engineering), the trio of programmers who created a huge stir in the DVD marketplace by releasing DeCSS, a program used to crack the Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption used to protect every DVD movie on the market.

Mathew Bevan

 (1974 - )   - 1,2,3,4    [website]

'Kuji' - Accused of breaching some sensitive computers belonging to the USAF and a commercial missile manufacturer in 1994. Mathew now works as a computer security.

Richard Pryce

 (1978 - )   - 1,2

'Datastream Cowboy' - Mentored by Matthew Bevan, Richard enjoyed penetrating .mil sites. The Times of London reported that knowing he was about to be arrested, Richard "curled up on the floor and cried."

Justin Tanner Petersen

 - 1,2,3

'Agent Steal' & 'Eric Heinz' - He served over 2 years in prison for hacking.

Dmitry Sklyarov

 - 1,2

Russian programmer who was arrested in 2001 by the FBI, at DefCon 9, for giving away software that removes the restrictions on encrypted Adobe Acrobat files.

Marc Maiffret

 (1981 - )   - 1,2,3,4    [website]

An engineer at eEye, or as he likes to tell it "chief hacking officer". Marc and eEye have been credited with finding numerous vulnerabilities in WinNT and Windows XP.

Vladimir Levin

 - 1,2

In 1994 Vladimir, a 23-year-old, led a Russian hacker group in the first publicly revealed international bank robbery over a network. Stealing around 10 million dollars from Citibank, which claims to have recovered all but $400,000 of the money. Levin was later caught and sentenced to 3 years in prison.

Dug Song

 - 1,2,3,4,5

A contributing member of the OpenSSH project.

Onel de Guzman

 - 1,2

Suspected of writing the 'I Love You' virus which was released in March of 2000. The computer virus computer was estimated to have caused $10 billion dollars USD in economic damages.

Chen Ing-Hou

 - 1

Chen Ing-Hou, the creator of the CIH virus, that takes his initials. This was the first known virus to target the flash BIOS.

David L. Smith

 (1968 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

Melissa virus author. The virus was released on March 26, 1999. Causing an estimated $80 million dollars USD in damages. In 2002 Smith was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

Rishi Khan

 - 1,2,3

Khan was instrumental in the investigation leading to the arrest of David L. Smith, who authored the Melissa virus.

Ehud Tenebaum

 (1979 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Analyzer' - In 1998, this Israeli teen was responsible for hacking dozens of unclassified Pentagon systems in what was "the most organized and systematic attack to date" on US military systems. The attacks exploited a well-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system for which a patch had been available for months.

Marty Roesch

 - 1,2,3,4,5    [website]

The author of Snort, an open source lightweight network intrusion detection system.

Johan Helsingius

 - 1,2,3

Operated the world's most popular anonymous remailer, called penet.fi. Was raided by the Finnish police in 1995 after the Church of Scientology complained that a penet.fi customer was posting the "church's" secrets on the Net. Helsingius closed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer's real e-mail address.

Julio Cesar Ardita

 - 1

'El Griton' - A 21 year old Argentinean who was sentenced to a three-year probation in 1997 for hacking into computer systems belonging to Harvard, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center.

Gerrie Mansur

 - 1

One of the leaders of Dutch hacking group Hit2000, he had access to Nasdaq.com, CBS.MarketWatch.com, BigCharts.com, and FTMarketWatch.com in 2000.

Eric O. Jenott

 (1976 - )   - 1,2

Eric Jenott, a Fort Bragg, NC paratrooper is accused of hacking U.S. Army systems and furnishing passwords to a citizen of communist China. Eric's attorney says the Fort Bragg soldier is just a computer hacker who tested the strength of a supposedly impenetrable computer system, found a weakness and then told his superiors about it. Eric was later cleared of the spy charges, but found guilty of damaging government property and computer fraud.

Loyd Blankenship

 - 1,2,3,4,5

'The Mentor' - LOD (Legion of Doom) member and author of the famous treatise, The Conscience of a Hacker, that comes to be known as the Hacker's Manifesto.

Randy Tischler

 - 1

''Taran King' - Phrack editor and creator.

Craig Neidorf

 - 1,2,3,4

'Knight Lightning' - Phrack editor and co-creator. In 1988 Craig is raided by the federal authorities and indicted for publishing the E911 document (describes how the 911 emergency phone system works). The indictment said the "computerized text file" was worth $79,449, and a BellSouth security official testified at trial it was worth $24,639. The trial began on July 23, 1990 but the proceedings unexpectedly ended when the government asked the court to dismiss all the charges when it was discovered that the public could call a toll-free number and purchase the same E911 document for less than $20.

Samir Rana

 - 1,2,3,4,5

'Torner' - 21 year-old London hacker and suspected member of the infamous hacking group Fluffy Bunny.

Eugene Kashpureff

 - 1,2,3

For eight days in July, 1997, a computer-security expert named Eugene Kashpureff pulled off one of the highest-profile hacks of this decade; he stole www.internic.net. More precisely, he redirected traffic from that website to his own, which lived at www.alternic.net.

Ejovi Nuwere

 - 1,2,3    [book]

Wrote the memoir Hacker Cracker: A Journey from the Mean Streets of Brooklyn to the Frontiers of Cyberspace.

Vasiliy Gorshkov

 (1975 - )   - 1,2

Vasiliy, age 27, of Chelyabinsk, Russia, sentenced 36 months in prison for his convictions on 20 counts of conspiracy, various computer crimes, and fraud committed against Speakeasy Network of Seattle, Washington; Nara Bank of Los Angeles, California; Central National Bank of Waco, Texas; and the online credit card payment company PayPal of Palo Alto, California.

William (Bill) Landreth

 (1964 - )   - 1    [book]

'the Cracker' - A bad picture of Bill but cool none the less. Bill was a member of the Inner Circle, an exclusive cracking club of the early 1980's. He began cracking when he was fouteen and retired at the ripe old age of 18 when FBI agents busted him and the Inner Circle in 1983. By then they had broken into computer systems of banks, newspapers, schools, the phone company, and credit card bureaus. The Inner Circle was indicted for computer fraud after they were caught tapping into the GTE Telemail Computer Network in Vienna, Virginia. Landreth was convicted and received three years probation. He now works in the area of computer security.

Alexey V. Ivanov

 (1980 - )   - 1

Ivanov, age 23, of Chelyabinsk, Russia, sentenced 48 months in prison for numerous charges of conspiracy, various computer crimes, and fraud committed against Speakeasy Network of Seattle, Washington; Nara Bank of Los Angeles, California; Central National Bank of Waco, Texas; and the online credit card payment company PayPal of Palo Alto, California.

Gary McKinnon

 (1966 - )   - 1,2,3,4,5

'Solo' - Scottish hacker accused by one United States prosecutor of perpetrating the "biggest military computer hack of all time." Gary, an unemployed computer systems administrator, is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense and the US Air Force plus one belonging to the Pentagon.