Way To Hackintosh : You must know about

<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
10 most audacious hacking attacks of all time
</h3>
<div class="post-header">

</div>
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_157538" style="width: 610px;">
<div class="img-share-wrapper">
<a class="cboxElement" href="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/Anonymous_at_Scientology_in_Los_Angeles.jpg" rel="lightbox[157343]" title="Anonymous at Scientology Church in Los Angeles."><img alt="" class="size-medium wp-image-157538" height="327" src="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/Anonymous_at_Scientology_in_Los_Angeles-600x327.jpg" title="Anonymous at Scientology Church in Los Angeles." width="600" /></a></div>
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Members of Anonymous group in Los Angeles. Photo source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_at_Scientology_in_Los_Angeles.jpg">Wikipedia</a></div>
</div>
<div class="subtitle">
We are in a golden age for the world of hackers. 
Everything is computerized or tied to a network, making the Internet a 
huge playground.</div>
IMAGINED TO BE super-high-tech geeks deciphering ridiculous lines of 
code or pimple-covered glass-wearing nerds hiding in their moms’ 
basements, these hackers have been orchestrating damaging attacks on the
 networks of governments, corporations, and other large organizations 
while simultaneously helping with the development of the World Wide Web 
and the founding of major tech companies.<br />

Here are 10 of the most audacious hacker attacks in the past years<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h5>
1. Kevin Poulsen</h5>
Known as “Dark Dante”, Poulsen gained recognition for hacking L.A. 
radio’s KIIS-FM by taking over all of the station’s phone lines and 
“winning” a Porsche during a contest. <br />

He ultimately ended up pissing off the FBI after wiretapping a Hollywood actress and hacking into the US Army and FBI computers.<br />

After months on the run, he was eventually ambushed in a supermarket,
 and sentenced to 51 months in prison, ordered to pay $56,000 to the 
radio stations, and banned from using a computer for three years. <br />

Today, Kevin Poulsen is a senior editor for <a href="http://www.wired.com/" target="_blank">Wired.com</a> News and has helped identify over 700 sex offenders with MySpace profiles. <br />

<h5>
2. Adrian Lamo</h5>
Dubbed the “homeless hacker,” Adrian Lamo used Internet connections 
at Kinko’s, coffee shops, and libraries to infiltrate major 
organizations like The New York Times and Microsoft.<br />

His intrusions consisted mainly of penetration testing, finding flaws
 in security, exploiting them and then informing companies of their 
shortcomings. His targets include Yahoo!, Bank of America, Citigroup and
 Cingular. <br />

Things started heating up when, in February 2002, he broke into the 
New York Times’ intranet, added his name to a list of Op-Ed 
contributors, and spent countless hours searching himself on <a href="http://www.lexisnexis.com/" target="_blank">Lexis-Nexis</a>. The FBI claimed the Lexis-Nexis searches cost the Times $300,000 and Lamo faced 15 years in jail for the breach. <br />

In the end, he was sentenced to two years probation and ordered to pay $65,000.<br />

<h5>
3. Michael Calce</h5>
While other teenagers his age were thinking about parties and girls, 
15-year-old Canadian Michael Calce (also known as “Mafiaboy”) spent his 
afternoons on his computer and became famous for executing the first 
major distributed-denial of service attack (DDoS) responsible for 
crippling some of the Internet’s most popular websites. <br />

He set out to make a name for himself in February 2000 when he took 
down the website of the no.1 search engine and second most popular 
website at the time: Yahoo!<br />
As if that feat wasn’t enough, he went on and hammered the servers of 
CNN, eBay, Dell, and Amazon in a wave of highly-publicized attacks that 
were the first to show the world how easily one kid can knockout major 
websites.<br />

Calce was ultimately picked up by the Canadian police and faced 3 
years in jail, but was sentenced to eight months in a juvenile detention
 center and forced to donate $250 to charity. <br />

<h5>
4. Jonathan James</h5>
In 1999, Jonathan James broke into military computers and installed a
 backdoor into a Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) server, part of 
the Department of Defense, and collected sensitive emails and employee 
usernames and passwords.<br />

Just for fun, he also hacked into <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/pulse/ten-best-nasa-photos-from-2010/">NASA</a> computers, stealing approximately $1.7 million worth of software that controlled the living environment on the <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/pulse/catch-a-glimpse-of-the-space-station-wherever-you-are-in-the-world/">International Space Station</a>,
 forcing the agency to shut down its computer systems for three weeks, 
and costing thousands of dollars in security upgrades. James later 
explained that he downloaded the code to supplement his studies on 
programming, but claimed that “the code itself was crappy [...] 
certainly not worth $1.7 million”.<br />

He was arrested and banned from recreational computer use and was 
sentenced to serve 6 months under house arrest with probation. However, 
he served 6 months in prison for violation of parole. <br />

But unlike other hackers, his story has a tragic twist: He committed 
suicide in 2007. In his suicide note, he denied having anything to do 
with a hacker attack he was being investigated for. The last words were:
 “I lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain 
control.”<br />

<h5>
5. Robert Tappan Morris</h5>
<div class="wp-caption alignleft" id="attachment_157548" style="width: 260px;">
<div class="img-share-wrapper">
<a class="cboxElement" href="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/Morris_Worm2.jpg" rel="lightbox[157343]" title=""Morris Worm" source code."><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-157548" height="333" src="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/Morris_Worm2.jpg" title=""Morris Worm" source code." width="250" /></a></div>
<div class="wp-caption-text">
"Morris Worm" source code. Photo source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Morris_Worm.jpg">Wikipedia</a></div>
</div>
In 1988, while enrolled as a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris created a monster: the Morris Worm.<br />

He designed the first self-replicating computer worm and unleashed it
 in the world wide web to check how deep the internet hole goes.<br />
He surely didn’t expect it to backfire, replicating itself beyond 
control as it infected thousands of computers, costing millions of 
dollars in damage, and inspiring the U.S. government to create a 
emergency response for computers known as the <a href="http://www.cert.org/" target="_blank">CERT</a>. <br />

Morris was eventually charged for his accidental crimes and ordered to pay $10,000 and do 400 hours of community service.<br />
He is currently working as a professor at the MIT, and the worm’s source
 code is archived on a black 3.5-inch floppy disk on display at the 
Boston Museum of Science.<br />

<h5>
6. David Smith</h5>
In 1999, David L. Smith, pleased by a stripper’s performance in 
Florida, decided to immortalize her memory by creating a computer virus 
baring her name. <br />

Using a stolen America Online account, Smith posted a Word document 
infected with “Melissa” to a discussion group on America Online, 
purporting it to be a list of usable log-in information to pornography 
sites.<br />
Smith’s virus spread like wildfire through email, forwarding itself to 
fifty email accounts on every infected computer, and which, over time, 
overloaded email servers and forced companies such as Microsoft, Intel, 
Lockheed Martin, and Lucent Technologies to shut down their email 
networks.<br />
In the end, more than one million PCs were infected, causing $80-million
 dollars in damage worldwide. For his idea of a virtual lapdance, Smith 
faced 10 years in jail, $5,000 in fines, but served just 20 months 
behind bars.<br />

<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_157551" style="width: 310px;">
<div class="img-share-wrapper">
<a class="cboxElement" href="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/800px-Lamo-Mitnick-Poulsen.png" rel="lightbox[157343]" title="Adrian Lamo, Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen."><img alt="" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-157551" height="200" src="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/800px-Lamo-Mitnick-Poulsen-300x200.png" title="Adrian Lamo, Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen." width="300" /></a></div>
<div class="wp-caption-text">
Lamo, Mitnick and Poulsen. Photo source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lamo-Mitnick-Poulsen.png">Wikipedia</a></div>
</div>
<h5>
7. Kevin Mitcnick</h5>
No hacker article is complete without mentioning Kevin Mitnick, one 
of the most notorious hackers in the last two decades. His mischief was 
hyped by the media but his actual offenses may be less notable than his 
notoriety suggests.<br />

Described as “the most wanted computer criminal in United States 
history”, Mitcnick started out exploiting the Los Angeles bus punch card
 system to get free rides, then dabbled in phone hacking.<br />
Mitnick’s mischief got serious when he went on a hacking spree targeting
 Motorola, NEC, Nokia, and Fujitsu Siemens systems, stealing corporate 
secrets, scrambling phone networks and infiltrating the national defense
 warning system.<br />
He ultimately made his biggest mistake by breaking into fellow hacker 
Tsutomu Shimomura’s home computer, which led to his undoing.<br />

After a well-publicized pursuit, the FBI arrested Mitnick on <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/nights/6-drink-recipes-for-a-special-valentines-day/">Valentine’s Day</a>,
 1995. He served five years in jail and about 8 months of it in solitary
 confinement thanks to law enforcement officials who claimed he could 
“start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone”. <br />

Today, Mitnick is a computer security consultant, famous author and speaker.<br />
His exploits were detailed in two movies: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0309614/" target="_blank">Freedom Downtime</a> and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784/" target="_blank">Takedown</a>.<br />

<h5>
8. Stuxnet</h5>
The most audacious hacker attack on this list was most likely 
committed by a nation, according to experts, which perpetrated against a
 very specific and sophisticated target.<br />

Discovered in June 2010, the worm Stuxnet spread out, mainly in <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/destinations/middle-east/iran/">Iran</a>, and shut down a fifth of the country’s nuclear centrifuges causing them to self-destruct by spinning wildly out of control.<br />

Researchers all agree that the worm was built by a very sophisticated
 and capable attacker and designed to harm computers and networks that 
met specific configuration requirements. The worm also avoided being 
detected by creating “situation normal” messages on computers monitoring
 centrifuges while it was in fact busy destroying them. A real 
marksman’s job.<br />

The source of the worm was never discovered.<br />

<h5>
9. Sony and the Playstation Network</h5>
One of the most recent hacker attacks that <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/226128/sony_makes_it_official_playstation_network_hacked.html">made the headlines</a>
 this year, thanks to thousands of angry geeks unable to access their 
favorite games online, was perpetrated on Sony’s Playstation Network 
database. <br />

More than 100 million Sony customers were affected last year when an 
unknown group of hackers breached into the network and scooped up data 
on their names, addresses, emails, login IDs, passwords, and credit-card
 numbers.<br />
Nobody to date knows who was behind the massive attack, even though many
 pointed fingers at one of the biggest hacker groups in the last few 
years, which finally leads us to number 10.<br />

<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_157553" style="width: 310px;">
<div class="img-share-wrapper">
<a class="cboxElement" href="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/750px-Anonymous_Flag.svg_.png" rel="lightbox[157343]" title="The Anonymous group's flag."><img alt="" class="size-thumbnail wp-image-157553" height="200" src="http://cdn1.matadornetwork.com/blogs/1/2011/10/750px-Anonymous_Flag.svg_-300x200.png" title="The Anonymous group's flag." width="300" /></a></div>
<div class="wp-caption-text">
The Anonymous group's flag. Photo source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous_Flag.svg">Wikipedia</a></div>
</div>
<h5>
10. Anonymous group</h5>
I couldn’t end the article without mentioning the most famous and active group of hackers in recent times.<br />

“Anonymous” is a nebulous collective of hackers who, for the past few
 years, have been engaged in various types of protests and civil 
disobedience and have been orchestrating campaigns against institutions 
and governments who seek to censor the web and hinder free expression. <br />

They are famous for their attack against the Scientology church, the 
Westboro Baptist church, the HBGary Federal, and the Bay Area Rapid 
Transit shutdown, as well as their support to <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/change/wikileaks-follows-brilliant-mastercard-parody-with-a-lawsuit-against-mastercard/">Wikileaks</a>, the Iranian Green Revolution and <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/running-as-sanity-in-syria/">The Arab Spring</a> revolutions.<br />
Their public statements are generally rife with mischief, often mocking 
their targets for their lack of security, but the bigger picture is that
 their actions are increasingly conscientious and pointed, <a href="http://matadornetwork.com/change/anonymous-joins-the-99-in-occupywallstreet/">supporting social movements</a> and fighting for a bigger cause. <br />

Will this new brand of cyber activism referred to as “hacktivism” help tip the balance in favor of Change around the world?</div>