Home » Latest » Network Technology » 10 Mastermind Hackers That Outplayed Everyone (even NASA)

10 Mastermind Hackers That Outplayed Everyone (even NASA)

3

InfoSearched 38 Network Technology

5.5

SaveSavedRemoved 1

Ten hackers, three decades, and one common thread: nobody’s system was as safe as they thought it was.

Bored Panda’s countdown “10 Mastermind Hackers That Outplayed Everyone (even NASA)” runs through a rogue’s gallery that spans phone phreaking in 1990 to prerelease Xbox One source code theft in 2013. Some of these names built legitimate careers afterward — one now jailbreaks consoles for a living, another writes for wired.com. Others did federal time and never fully recovered their reputations.

• Gary McKinnon (“Solo”) broke into 97 NASA and U.S. military computers between 2001 and 2002 hunting for suppressed free-energy and UFO evidence, triggering a decade-long extradition fight the UK finally blocked in 2012.
• Jonathan James (“c0mrade”) became the first juvenile ever incarcerated for cybercrime after infiltrating the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and NASA in 1999, downloading software critical to the International Space Station’s life-support systems.
• Kevin Poulsen rigged Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM’s phone lines in 1990 to guarantee himself the 102nd caller slot and win a Porsche 944 S2, then evaded the FBI for years before reinventing himself as an investigative journalist.

The NASA Breach That Gave the Video Its Title

Gary McKinnon sits at #5 on the countdown, but he’s the reason NASA gets top billing in the title. Between February 2001 and March 2002, the Scottish systems administrator remotely accessed 97 U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense, and NASA computers, allegedly deleting critical files and leaving a message calling U.S. security “crap.” He wasn’t after money — McKinnon has said repeatedly he was searching for evidence of free energy suppression and extraterrestrial contact.

97 NASA and U.S. military computers, breached over roughly 13 months, by one man looking for UFOs.

What followed was one of the longest extradition sagas in cybercrime history. U.S. prosecutors pursued McKinnon for nearly a decade before the UK Home Secretary blocked his extradition in 2012 on human rights grounds, citing his Asperger’s diagnosis and risk of suicide.

From Prank Calls to Federal Cellblocks

Kevin Poulsen’s Porsche stunt at #10 reads like a heist movie: he seized control of KIIS-FM’s phone trunk lines to lock out every other caller during a 1990 contest, then had to go underground for years before his eventual arrest. He now edits security coverage as a journalist, a rare hacker-to-newsroom pipeline.

Kevin Mitnick, ranked #7, ran a longer and higher-stakes campaign, social-engineering his way into Sun Microsystems, Motorola, and Pacific Bell before the FBI finally arrested him in 1995. Jonathan James, at #8, was younger and faced harsher consequences — his 1999 intrusion into DTRA and NASA systems made him the first minor ever jailed for a cybercrime conviction.

The Console Wars Turn Criminal

George Hotz, better known as “geohot,” lands at #9 for cracking the original iPhone’s carrier lock with his “purplera1n” tool at just 17 years old, then jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 in 2010 — a feat that drew a lawsuit from Sony. The “Xbox Underground” collective at #6 operated on a larger, more organized scale, breaching Microsoft, Valve, and Epic Games between 2011 and 2013 to steal prerelease Xbox One source code and, notably, U.S. Army combat training software.

Anyone curious how modern security teams frame these kinds of intrusions can compare the tactics described in The Five Laws of Cybersecurity against what these groups actually pulled off decades apart.

Biometrics, Slot Machines, and Organized Raids

Higinio Ochoa (“w0rmer”), at #4, breached multiple law enforcement agencies with the CabinCr3w collective in 2012 — and got caught only after posting a photo of his girlfriend that carried embedded GPS metadata pinpointing his location. Jan Krissler (“starbug”), at #3, took a different route entirely, cloning fingerprints from high-resolution photographs to defeat biometric locks and fool Apple’s Touch ID sensor.

John Kane, at #2, found a glitch in Game King video poker machines in 2009 that let him legally exploit the payout structure — no malware, no breach, just an unpatched software flaw and a casino floor. The #1 slot goes to the hackers behind 7chan.org, whose late-2000s denial-of-service raids and forum compromises were less about profit than pure disruption. The kind of surveillance economy that grew up around catching people like these gets its own look in this piece on a $9 million WhatsApp hacking van.

Kane’s case is the one worth sitting with: he didn’t write a line of malicious code, didn’t phish anyone, didn’t touch a firewall. He just found a bug in a Game King machine’s payout logic before the casino did — and under the letter of the law at the time, cashing in on it wasn’t even clearly illegal.