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All-time Most Notorious Hackers

slavezero — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:46:36 +0000

While I was browsing on some sites I stumbled on several sites, and saw their article about the most notorious hackers of our time. The post was very interesting so I decided to share it with all of my readers. They have great minds but they really wasted their talents. They are just a few of those great computer minds that instead of doing some helpful deeds, protecting the cyberworld, helping and sharing their knowledge to other people they do some crazy stuffs, not just an ordinary crazy stuff but destructive stuffs.

Here are some of them:

Gary McKinnon

Gary McKinnon, 40, accused of mounting the largest ever hack of United States government computer networks — including Army, Air Force, Navy and NASA systems — listens to a reporter’s question outside the Bow Magistrates Court in central London Wednesday May 10, 2006. The court has recommended that McKinnon be extradited to the United States to face charges of illegally accessing 97 computers, causing US$700,000 (400,000 pounds; euro 588,000) in damage. British Home Secretary John Reid will make the final decision on extradition but if he approves it, McKinnon will appeal to the High Court, the alleged hacker said.

Kevin Mitnick (Several Convictions in the 1990’s)

For several years he made a career out of hacking into computers, stealing corporate secrets, scrambling phone networks, and breaking into the national defense warning system which caused millions of dollars in losses. He has spent almost six years in prison in solitary confinement for his notorious crimes.

It seems his hacking days are over, however. He is now a computer consultant, author, and public speaker. His story has inspired two Hollywood movies: Takedown and Freedom Downtime.

Adrian Lamo (Convicted in 2004)

Adrian Lamo admitted to various computer crimes directed at companies like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ameritech, Cingular, AOL Time Warner, Bank of America, Citigroup, McDonald’s and Sun Microsystems, but he is best known his intrusion into “The New York Times” internal computer system. He repeatedly hacked into the system to add his name to confidential databases of expert sources. He also used the paper’s LexisNexis account to conduct research on high-profile subjects.

In 2004, he surrendered to FBI and pleaded guilty to one count of computer crimes against Microsoft, Lexis-Nexis and “The New York Times”. He was sentenced to six months’ detention at his parents’ home plus two years probation, and was ordered to pay roughly $65,000 in restitution.

Lamo is now an award winning journalist and public speaker. He has interviewed personalities like John Ashcroft and Oliver Stone.

Jonathan James (Convicted in 2000)

Jonathan James was the first juvenile, at the age of 16, to be jailed for computer crimes in the United States. His crimes were directed toward NASA and the US Department of Defense.

NASA claimed he downloaded $1.7 million worth of proprietary software. He then admitted to installing a “sniffer” on the Department of Defense’s computer system which allowed him to intercept over three thousand messages passing to and from employees, along with numerous usernames and passwords of other DoD employees. At least ten of the computers he hacked into were military computers

Although he could have served up to ten years in jail, the fact that he was a juvenile reduced his initial sentence to six months in jail and probation until he was 18 (he was also required to write apology letters to NASA and DoD). The judge then reduced the sentence to six months of house arrest and probation until the age of 21. After violating probation he was required to serve the full six months in a federal correctional facility.

Operation Web Snare (2004)

As of 2004, operation Web Snare is the “largest and most successful” law enforcement operation related to online fraud. The operation included more than 150 investigations of Internet-related crimes, including denial-of-service attacks, computer hacking, selling counterfeit software, phishing, and identity theft. More than 870,000 victims lost more than $210 million dollars from such crimes.

Among those convicted were Utah resident Mark Pentrack who offered car parts, aircraft parts, and other items for sale over the Internet, but did not own those items. More than ten people sent Pentrack more than $200,000 for such items. He hired secretaries in five states outside Utah to receive payments from the consumers, used an Australia based e-mail service, and used an “anonymizing” program when conducting online activities. He was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to mail fraud, misuse of a Social Security number, attempted destruction of evidence, and making a false statement in connection with an Internet fraud scheme.

Max Ray Butler (Convicted in 2001)

Also known as Max Vision, Max Ray Butler was a talented computer specialist who ran a computer security company in Silicon Valley. He was also a highly-skilled hacker who went to prison for creating an Internet worm that hacked into systems at McChord Air Force Base, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the Argonne and Brookhaven National Labs, IDSoftware, and an unspecified Defense Department system.

Interestingly, Max was an FBI informant for five years. He supplied to the FBI information about several major cracks and helped track down other computer hackers.

Police arrested Max in March 2000 after he refused to wear a wiretap to a meeting with a friend who was being suspected of cyber-crimes. He was later charged with 15 counts of hacking-related crimes including computer intrusion, possession of stolen passwords and interception of communications. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

His hacking career didn’t end with his prison sentence, though. Recently he was in court facing with charges of wire fraud and identity theft. He faces a possible sentence of 40 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine if convicted.

Nahshon Even-Chaim (Convicted in 1993)

Nahshon Even-Chaim , aka Phoenix, belonged to an elite computer hacking group known as The Realm. He was the first major computer hacker to be convicted in Australia. His targets centered on defense and nuclear weapons research networks. He was so skilled that many of his victims weren’t aware they were victimized until the evidence was presented after the arrests.

Some of his crimes include stealing a password cracking program from NASA, gaining unauthorized access to universities involved in nuclear energy research, tampering with files and crashing the system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which controlled the world’s most powerful laser, and many more.

Wire and data taps gave police all the evidence they needed to charge Even-Chaim with 48 offenses, most of which carried a maximum ten year sentence. After negotiations, however, his sentence was reduced to 500 hours of community service and a 12 month suspended jail term.

Vasiliy Gorshikov and Alexey Ivanov (Convicted in 2001)

After a very complex undercover FBI operations, Vasiliy Gorshikov and Alexey Ivanov of Chelyabinsk, Russia were arrested for 20 counts of computer crimes, fraud and conspiracy. They were convicted for stealing approximately 50,000 credit card numbers from U.S. online banks, e-commerce companies and Internet service providers.

Gorshikov was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay $690,000 in restitution charges, while Ivanov received a 3 years and 8 month sentence and restitution charges of $800,000.

Jeanson James Ancheta (Convicted in 2006)

Jeanson James Ancheta of California was charged with 17 counts of conspiracy, fraud and other crimes connected to a 14-month hacking spree that started in June 2004. He pleaded guilty to seizing control of hundreds of thousands of computers and renting the zombie network to people who used it to send out spam. He silently downloaded Spy ware/Ad ware to more than 400,000 infected computers that he controlled. He admitted to gaining for himself and a co-conspirator more than $100,000 in advertising affiliate proceeds.

Among the computers he attacked were some at the Weapons Division of the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, and at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Ancheta was sentenced to almost five years in federal prison and ordered to pay approximately $15,000 to the United States federal government for inflicting damage on military computers. He was also forced to return to the government more than $60,000 in cash, a BMW automobile and computer equipment.

See more of them Convicted Notorious of our time

More White-Black-Grey Hat Hackers

Your Computer Is Infected… And You Don’t Know It

slavezero — Tue, 26 May 2009 15:55:55 +0000

Early in the internet days when your computer got infected by some virus it would immediately cause your computer to crash. Scammers today got much more smarter in creating and spreading their viruses and other malicious programs. They now realize that leaving their victim’s computer will be much more better to easily steal any important information from their victims. That is how they get your precious accounts, installing and running their viruses on your computer without you knowing it. In today’s technology, how do you know if your computer is infected and vulnerable to any attacks if your computer doesn’t crash?

Well, here are some signs to watch out for to know if your computer has been hijacked.

If you suddenly notice that your computer is going through periods of prolonged slowdowns then this maybe a case of malicious programs running on your computer. You will not be able to notice this because most of the time they are running in the background.

Your search gives you wrong results or you get forwarded to websites that you don’t have an intention of visiting.

Your computer starts to get annoying pop-ups. This is a usual problems normally caused by adwares on your computer.

Now that you know some signs, the question now is what is the best way to fix or heal an infected computer?. The very best thing to do is to have an updated and reliable antivirus. You can try different protection software if the one you are using is unable to find any infection on your machine.

Most of the users performs disk reformatting and operating system reinstallation if their antivirus can’t fix the problem. That would definitely help but make sure that when you create a backup your files are clean otherwise the infection will still come back to ruin your computing life.

You will never know what will happen to your computer once it gets infected, it’s just a bomb waiting to explode on your face. Some will send you unwanted ads others will take your data. There are some that will alter your search results and record every keystrokes you made this programs are called keyloggers. As technology grows so does the viruses released everyday that can harm your computer. You have to be diligent enough to be able to stay one step ahead of those scammers.

The next time you know that you computer is not performing the way it should be then immediately stop on what you are doing and scan your computer right away. Don’t give those hackers a chance to get what they want on your computer.

How to fix “Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator”

slavezero — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:11:14 +0000

One of my reader just emailed me and he wants to remove the virus from his computer manually but his problem was he cannot open his registry editor it say’s that “Registry Editing Has Been Disabled By Your Administrator”. This type of problem usually also happens to me when I am working on a virus, trojan or spyware infected computer. Regedit is one of the most important command of Windows that is also why virus makers love’s to disable the Registry Editor so it makes solving the problem and removing the issue difficult.

Viruses are not always the reason for this issue sometimes administrators in I.T. departments place a restrictions on using the regedit command to keep employees from changes things on company computers, on his case his registry is disabled by a virus.

Below are the different ways that I recommend to enable his Registry Editor.(the #1 method successfully worked for him). Although there are a few other ways, the four ways below are the way that I have used with great success in re-enabling the REGEDIT command.

#1 Using a registry tool.

You can use regtools.vbs to enable your registry. This is a VBscript that enables or disables the Registry Editor based on the following location in the registry. Of course, since the registry editor is disabled, you can’t change it manually. Visit the site for more information http://www.dougknox.com/security/scripts_desc/regtools.htm

After downloading regtools double-click on it to run it, then reboot your computer and try to open the Registry Editor.

This works best but If this fix didn’t solve your problem, try the other ways below.

#2 Using Symantec’s tool to reset shell\open\command registry keys

Sometimes worms and trojans will make changes to the shell\open\command registry entries as part of their infections. This will cause the virus to run each time you try to run an .exe file such as the Registry Editor. In these cases, visit Symantec’s website and download the UnHookExec.inf file to your desktop. Right-click on it and choose Install. Restart your computer and then try to open the Registry Editor.

#3 Renaming Regedit.com to Regedit.exe

Some viruses and other malware will load a regedit.com file that is many times a zero byte dummy file. Because .com files have preference over .exe files when executed if you type REGEDIT in the run line, it will run the regedit.com instead of the real regedit.exe file.

Delete the regedit.com file if its a zero byte file to restore access to REGEDIT. In some cases, such as the W32.Navidad worm, you’ll need to rename the REGEDIT file to get it to work.

#4 Changing Windows XP Professional and Group Policy Editor

If you have Windows XP Professional and access to an administrative user account, you could change the registry editor options in the Group Policy Editor.

Click on Start then Run

Type GPEDIT.MSC and Press Enter

Go to the following location

User Configuration

Administrative Templates

System

In the Settings Window, find the option for “Prevent Access to Registry Editing Tools” and double-click on it to change.

Select Disabled or Not Configured and choose OK

Close the Group Policy Editor and restart your computer

Try opening REGEDIT again