Cyber warfare is something we often find making the front pages these days. Be it a hacking program created by a teenager or an organized hacking campaign to bring superpowers down, the world wide web has had to face all kinds of hacking attempts.
The keyboard is an equally lethal weapon as a gun these days. Someone could rob all the money in your bank account with a creatively programmed virus.
Here, we have assembled a list of the most notorious yet successful internet hacks of all time. All of us should be afraid of the #10.
#1 MafiaBoy causing $1 billion in damages (2000)
MafiaBoy was a 15- year old boy named Michael Calce from Canada. In the year 2000 when he was a high school student, he managed to hack into multiple commercial websites including Amazon and eBay through a DDoS attack.
The total damage according to reliable sources was $1.2 billion. He was sentenced to 8 months in open custody.
#2 The Morris Worm (1988)
Morris was a student at the Cornell University in the USA. He is credited for creating the first computer worm that was successfully transmitted through the internet. According to him, the purpose of his worm was to explore the vastness of the world wide web.
This worm became the victim of a critical error and ended up damaging thousands of computers, causing a loss of up to 1$100 million.
#3 Google China hacked (2009)
In December of 2009, Google's Chinese headquarters detected a breach. It was found that this attack was designed to implicate the Chinese government.
Intellectual property was at risk and most of it got stolen by the hackers from multiple corporate servers. Google had to face a re-evaluation because of this attack.
#4 Teenager that hacked NASA and US Defense Department:
It was back in 1999 when a 15-year old kid named Jonathan James did the unthinkable by hacking into US Defense Department's servers. He intercepted large piles of personal data including emails and passwords to military computers.
Using that stolen information, James got his hands on a NASA software that caused them a loss of more than $41,000.
#5 Phone lines blocked to win Porsche (1995)
A hacker named Kevin Poulsen made his mark in the field when most people didn't even know about hacking.
He hacked into LA phone lines to win a sports car on an ongoing radio contest. The FM channel was offering a Porsche to its 102nd caller. Kevin blocked all other callers and proclaimed himself the winner by being the 102nd caller.
#6 Scientology Hack (2008)
A DDoS attack was launched by a group of hackers that dismantled the Church of Scientology website for many days.
A 19-year old named Dmitry Guzner was charged for this offense and had to serve 2 years probation.
#7 Solar Sunrise Hack (1998)
In 1998, a cyber attack took over more than 500 government and company-owned computer systems. All the systems being attacked were running on the Sun Solaris operating systems. Therefore, a collective attack on all these systems was named "Solar Sunrise".
#8 The Melissa virus (1999)
Melissa was a simply constructed virus made by David Smith that cost more than $0.8 billion. It worked by infecting MS Word documents and automatically attach itself to emails. It used to email the virus to the first 50 names in your Outlook email box.
#9 Internet attacked (2002)
A hacking attack attempted to infect the whole internet system with all its 13 DNS root servers in 2002. This DDoS attack lasted for only 60 minutes, however, it was the scale of this attack that was alarming. It was the largest and most complex cyber attack according to US Federal services.
#10 Credit Card Details Hack (2009)
Credit for the biggest online fraud case in the US history goes to T. Gonzales, a Miami based hacker. He managed to steal millions of credit and debit card numbers belonging to more than 250 financial institutions.
