When most of us are trying to comprehend the bright and enjoyable side of the world, there are a few teenagers who are busy exploring the dark side of the world for fun and curiosity. In this scenario, we're talking about hacking.
Here, we present the top 5 young hackers who, in our opinion, will go down in history as legendary hackers.
Michael Calce
Michael Calce, widely known as "Mafiaboy," a 15-year-old, learned how to infiltrate university computer networks in February 2000. He pooled their resources and picked Yahoo, the leading search engine at the time, as a target.
In less than a week, he also knocked down Dell, eBay, CNN, and Amazon by employing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that overloaded corporate servers and crashed their websites.
Kevin Poulsen
Under the identity Dark Dante, a 17-year-old Poulsen gained access to the Pentagon's computer network ARPANET in 1983. Despite being swiftly apprehended, the authorities chose not to press charges against Poulsen, who was still a child at the time.
Instead, he was given a warning and released. Poulsen ignored this advice and carried on hacking. Poulsen broke into the records of Ferdinand Marcos, the ousted president of the Philippines, in 1988 after hacking into a government computer.
Poulsen fled into hiding after being apprehended by the authorities. Poulsen stayed busy while he was hiding out by hacking into government databases and leaking information.
He allegedly hacked a radio station contest in 1990 to make sure he was the 102nd caller, winning a brand-new Porsche, a trip, and $20,000 in the process.
James Kosta
James Kosta, who was 13 years old when he pulled his first stunt, is arguably the most well-known of the young hackers. He and his collaborators broke into military and significant commercial computers, including those of major financial institutions, General Electric, and IBM.
He was found guilty of 45 counts of technical burglary when he was just 14 years old, and he received a 45-year jail term. At the age of 18, he decided to enlist in the Navy as an intelligence analyst.
He joined the CIA at the age of 20 to hunt down warlords in the Middle East and Africa. He sold his first dotcom business for millions of dollars at the age of 24.
Jonathan James
Jonathan James hacked into multiple businesses using the moniker cOmrade. But what drew the most attention to James was his hacking into the systems of the United States Department of Defense. Even more amazing was the fact that James was just 15 at the time.
In 1999, James broke into organizations including Bell South, the Miami-Dade school district, and the Department of Defense. He was given access to details such as the source code for the International Space Station's operation (ISS).
NASA had to turn off its computer systems, incurring a final bill of $41,000. James was arrested in 2000, given a six-month house detention term, and prohibited from using computers for leisure. He did, however, spend six months in jail due to a probation breach.
Jonathan James was the youngest person to be found guilty of breaking the legislation against cybercrime. James committed suicide with a pistol in 2008.
Richard Pryce
16-year-old Richard Pryce (Datastream Cowboy) and his 19-year-old accomplice Mathew Bevan (also known as Kuji) conned the American government when they hacked the Pentagon's network for many weeks in 1994.
They stole war simulations from the Griffiss Air Force Base in New York, eavesdropped on communications between American spies in North Korea, and gained access to a Korean nuclear plant.
They came dangerously close to starting a global conflict between the United States and North Korea.
Albert Gonzalez
Gonzalez made his first purchase of a computer at the age of 12. In just 2 years, he cracked into NASA. Gonzalez was detained by the authorities at the age of 22, accusing him of obtaining debit card data and engaging in debit card fraud.
More than 180 million credit card accounts from various businesses were stolen by him. Gonzalez and his group have taken about $256 million from TJX alone. Gonzalez will be freed in 2025 after receiving two concurrent sentences of 20 years in prison.
Julian Assange
Julian Assange began hacking under the alias "Mendax" when he was 16 years old. Over a four-year period, he obtained access to networks owned by the Pentagon, Citibank, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and Stanford University.
Assange established WikiLeaks in 2006 as a platform for disclosing secret documents and breaking news from unidentified sources. The United States launched an investigation into Assange in 2010 with the intention of bringing charges against him under the 1917 Espionage Act.
Despite the British courts rejecting the US's request for extradition, he is now detained in the UK.
Lapsus$
The ransomware assaults on several big corporations (Nvidia, Microsoft, Samsung), most recently including Okta, were allegedly carried out by the South American-based cybercrime group Lapsus$.
And surprisingly, the team is led by a 16-year-old teenager living with his parents near Oxford, England. The youngster, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was first said to have been doxxed by other hackers following a split.
The teenager is accused of earning $14 million from the actions of the organization. Each of the breaches Lapsu$ claimed to have carried out involved company intrusion and extortion for the confidential information and proprietary code that the hackers had taken.
The organization had penetrated each firm in turn, stealing substantial amounts of data from each.