10 Former Hackers Who’ve Gone on to Build Succesful Careers
10. Kevin Poulsen
Wired.com’s news editor, Kevin Poulsen started out by putting his tech talents to an altogether different use. As a teenager, Poulsen was a prolific hacker with a number of high-level security breaches to his name. The FBI eventually caught on to his exploits, though, and in November 1989 he was accused of a string of offenses including conspiracy and fraud. Still, rather than waving the white flag, Poulsen opted to go on the run. It was during this time that his most famous hack occurred. On June 1, 1990, Poulsen used his phone line hacking expertise to ensure that he was the “lucky 102nd caller” in a competition to win a Porsche held by LA radio station KIIS FM. However, the authorities caught up with him the following year, and he spent just over five years in jail after pleading guilty to computer fraud. Back then this was the lengthiest U.S. term ever handed down for any such offense.
Upon his release, Poulsen decided to embark on a different career path as a journalist. He has gone on to receive a number of awards for his work and has broken several high-profile news stories, including the arrest of Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning for releasing classified documents to WikiLeaks.
9. John Draper
Proving that a techy alias is not a prerequisite, legendary hacker John Draper is also popularly known as Captain Crunch. The nickname stems from one of Draper’s earliest hacking exploits, where he effectively gained control of Bell System (subsequently AT&T) phone lines by means of the tone produced by a whistle given away in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal at the time. The authorities and phone company were not enamored with Draper’s “experiments,” though, and in May 1972 he was arrested for toll fraud and went on to receive five years’ probation. A second arrest for telephone fraud followed in 1974, and here Draper earned a prison sentence, serving five months in California’s Lompoc penitentiary.
Nevertheless, prior to his arrests Draper had made a couple of very useful contacts in the shape of Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Moreover, while in jail Draper coded a large part of EasyWriter – which was the earliest word processing software for the Apple II computer – and was hired by the then nascent Apple soon after his release. EasyWriter was then ported to the IBM PC in a highly profitable agreement that allowed Draper to purchase a property in Hawaii plus a Mercedes. Yet despite having held several job roles and developed various pieces of software since then, Draper has also led something of a drifter’s life.
8. Robert Morris
How the worm has turned. Robert Morris gained a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from Harvard University in 1999 and became a professor at MIT that same year. He is also the man who, in 1988, developed what is widely recognized as the earliest internet computer worm. Morris created the worm while he was a Cornell University postgraduate student, purportedly to “gauge the size of the internet.” However, the worm took advantage of a number of security vulnerabilities in host computers and also replicated itself, ultimately resulting in damage estimated at a cost of up to $10 million – although this figure has been disputed. In 1989 Morris was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, receiving a ruling of three years’ probation plus a $10,050 fine. Since then, he has co-founded a couple of start-ups, including Viaweb, which Yahoo bought for $48 million in 1998. And, as mentioned, he also established a successful career in academia, gaining his tenure at MIT in 2006.
7. Owen Thor Walker
As we’ve already seen, a techie alias is by no means mandatory for success in the world of hacking – but neither does it hurt to have a middle name of legendary proportions. As a teenager in New Zealand, Owen Thor Walker used his self-taught computer skills to help a network of cyber criminals steal from online bank accounts and gain access to more than a million computers, bringing about losses in excess of $20 million. He was detained in late 2007 and charged with several counts of cyber crime – with extradition by the FBI a prospect at one stage. Walker pleaded guilty to the charges in 2008, and while he was forced to pay the equivalent of over $8,000 in damages, he was spared a potential jail sentence after the judge said that a conviction might thwart a promising future on the right side of the law. Later that year, Walker was taken on as a security consultant by New Zealand telecoms firm TelstraClear (now part of Vodafone New Zealand). A spokesman for the company sought to play down the significance of Walker’s past, suggesting that his appointment was “not the equivalent of hiring a bank robber to advise on bank security.”
6. Christopher Tarnovsky
Christopher Tarnovsky started out on the path to hacking infamy in 1996 by repairing pirated satellite TV access cards. He quickly established a reputation and was approached by a Canadian pirate, who paid him $20,000 to repair cards that were being put out of action by the electronic countermeasures (ECMs) deployed by the cards’ manufacturers. Whenever new ECM codes were sent out, Tarnovsky could often circumvent them within minutes. “It was like a chess game for me,” he said in a 2008 interview.
Interestingly, it didn’t take long before Tarnovsky was being approached by card manufacturer NDS to work for them. He accepted the offer and was tasked with identifying vulnerabilities in the NDS software while also working incognito among pirates to gain inside information on their latest hacking tactics. However, in 2007 NDS fired Tarnovsky, and the following year both he and NDS found themselves accused of piracy in a lawsuit brought by U.S. pay-television provider DISH Network. The lawsuit was ultimately unsuccessful, though, and in 2012 Tarnovsky was installed as vice president of semiconductor security services for computer security firm IOActive.
5. George Hotz
Also known as Geohot, U.S. hacker George Hotz came to prominence in 2007 as the first individual to unlock the iPhone, which meant that it could be used with network providers other than AT&T. Since then, Hotz has released a number of iterations of jailbreaking software for iOS devices, but it was his hacking of the PlayStation 3 that really invited trouble. In January 2011 Sony took legal action against Hotz for offenses including computer fraud and copyright infringement. Unperturbed, the following month Hotz released a rap video on his YouTube channel in which he waxed lyrical about his lawsuit. Remarkably, as early as April 2011 the two parties arrived at an out-of-court settlement, with the stipulation that Hotz cannot participate in any future hacking of Sony products. In May that same year Hotz was hired by Facebook, yet while he worked with the company until January 2012, his responsibility there was not revealed.
4. Jeff Moss
In 2009 Jeff Moss became part of the Obama administration’s Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC), yet his early hacking adventures were more concerned with overturning security measures than maintaining them. “Hacking is sort of a skill set – it’s neutral. You can be a criminal hacker or you can be a noncriminal hacker,” Moss said in a 2011 interview. And to begin with he used that skill set to override copyright protection on games and hack into phone networks to get free calls. Now, though, Moss is a prime example of a “white hat” hacker; that is, someone who uses their hacking expertise ethically to check the robustness of computer security systems – with the approval of the organization being tested. As well as performing his white hat work, Moss is the founder of hacking conference DEF CON and information security conference Black Hat, the latter of which he sold in 2005 for what was said to be $13.9 million. What’s more, while his appointment to the HSAC might have seemed strange to some, others were not so surprised. Threat analyst and journalist Adrian Lamo commented on the selection, saying, “The reality is he’s as corporate as hiring someone out of Microsoft.”
3. Peter Hajas
Peter Hajas came to prominence as the lead developer of MobileNotifier, an open-source notification system for jailbroken iOS devices that was designed to replace Apple’s own alert messaging system. Released in its earliest incarnation in October 2010, MobileNotifier had been downloaded 230,000 times by May the following year; such was the level of discontent with Apple’s notification system at the time. But the software’s success obviously brought Hajas to Apple’s attention, and in May 2011 he posted a blog on his website announcing that he was taking time out from MobileNotifier to pursue other opportunities. A tweet also appeared in which Hajas said that he was going to gain employment in California with a “fruit” company, and it was soon confirmed that he had been hired by Apple to develop iOS apps and frameworks.
2. Chris Putnam
Back in 2005, when Myspace was still something that people seriously used, Chris Putnam created a worm that worked its way through Facebook, making some people’s profiles look like Myspace pages. As hilariously topical as the prank may or may not have been at the time, it also caused certain contact details to be wiped, and sure enough Facebook identified Putnam as the man behind the worm. However, rather than bringing a legal case against Putnam, Facebook presented him with the opportunity of an interview instead. On his way to the interview, due to be held with Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Putnam remained wary of his prospective employers’ true motives, commenting, “I got in the elevator, it went up to the 2nd floor where I was to meet Dustin, and the doors opened with Dustin – not cops – standing right in front of me. This was an enormous relief.” Putnam ended up working at Facebook for four years, and his face has even been immortalised as one of the emoticons available on Facebook chat.
1. Kevin Mitnick
Just before his arrest in February 1995, Kevin Mitnick was firmly at the top of the USA’s computer criminal wanted list. Under a plea bargain that saw him admit charges including computer fraud and unlawfully intercepting wire communications, Mitnick served five years’ jail time, with eight months of that term spent in isolation. Why the solitary confinement? Mitnick says it was down to security officials persuading a judge that he was capable of sparking “a nuclear war by whistling into a payphone.” Either way, after his release Mitnick went on to set up information security firm Mitnick Security Consulting, and in 2012 he became Chief Hacking Officer at KnowBe4, a company that provides “next-generation security awareness training.” When hacking, Mitnick specialized in social engineering – the process of targeting a company’s employees to steer them into releasing classified information. As he told a conference in London in 2013, “The attacker only has to find one person in the business to make a bad decision and then they have a foot in the door.”
Wired.com’s news editor, Kevin Poulsen started out by putting his tech talents to an altogether different use. As a teenager, Poulsen was a prolific hacker with a number of high-level security breaches to his name. The FBI eventually caught on to his exploits, though, and in November 1989 he was accused of a string of offenses including conspiracy and fraud. Still, rather than waving the white flag, Poulsen opted to go on the run. It was during this time that his most famous hack occurred. On June 1, 1990, Poulsen used his phone line hacking expertise to ensure that he was the “lucky 102nd caller” in a competition to win a Porsche held by LA radio station KIIS FM. However, the authorities caught up with him the following year, and he spent just over five years in jail after pleading guilty to computer fraud. Back then this was the lengthiest U.S. term ever handed down for any such offense.
Proving that a techy alias is not a prerequisite, legendary hacker John Draper is also popularly known as Captain Crunch. The nickname stems from one of Draper’s earliest hacking exploits, where he effectively gained control of Bell System (subsequently AT&T) phone lines by means of the tone produced by a whistle given away in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal at the time. The authorities and phone company were not enamored with Draper’s “experiments,” though, and in May 1972 he was arrested for toll fraud and went on to receive five years’ probation. A second arrest for telephone fraud followed in 1974, and here Draper earned a prison sentence, serving five months in California’s Lompoc penitentiary.
As we’ve already seen, a techie alias is by no means mandatory for success in the world of hacking – but neither does it hurt to have a middle name of legendary proportions. As a teenager in New Zealand, Owen Thor Walker used his self-taught computer skills to help a network of cyber criminals steal from online bank accounts and gain access to more than a million computers, bringing about losses in excess of $20 million. He was detained in late 2007 and charged with several counts of cyber crime – with extradition by the FBI a prospect at one stage. Walker pleaded guilty to the charges in 2008, and while he was forced to pay the equivalent of over $8,000 in damages, he was spared a potential jail sentence after the judge said that a conviction might thwart a promising future on the right side of the law. Later that year, Walker was taken on as a security consultant by New Zealand telecoms firm TelstraClear (now part of Vodafone New Zealand). A spokesman for the company sought to play down the significance of Walker’s past, suggesting that his appointment was “not the equivalent of hiring a bank robber to advise on bank security.”
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