Gary McKinnon

Alias: Solo
Age: 46

Gary McKinnon hacked nearly 100 American military and NASA servers from February 2001 to March 2002. What's even crazier is he did it all from his girlfriend’s aunt’s house in London. He managed to delete sensitive data, software, and files, and the U.S. government spent over $700,000 to recover from the damage. He taunted the military while he was at it, posting this message to their website: “Your security system is crap. I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”

McKinnon is an interesting guy. He's said his main inspiration for the attack was The Hacker's Handbook by Hugo Cornwall. While hacking NASA, he purposely looked for files that contained evidence of extraterrestrials. He told Wired in 2006 that he found them, too. "A NASA photographic expert said that there was a Building 8 at Johnson Space Center where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging," he said. "I logged on to NASA and was able to access this department. They had huge, high-resolution images stored in their picture files. They had filtered and unfiltered, or processed and unprocessed, files." He currently still lives in Britain.

Michael Calce
Alias: Mafiaboy
Age: 30

To ring in the new millennium, Michael Calce launched denial-of-services attacks against Amazon, CNN, eBay, Yahoo!, and Dell. Back then, Yahoo! was the world's leading search engine before Google, and Calce's attack—which he dubbed Project Rivolta—caused it to go down for about an hour. President Bill Clinton convened a cybersecurity task force and the country was on the hunt for "Mafiaboy." He was caught a short time later after he bragged about the attacks in a chat room. In 2001, he was sentenced to eight months of open custody, restricted use of the Internet, and a small fine. A little lenient for such a big attack, no? Well, yeah it was, because Calce was still in high school at the time. "The sense of power I felt was overwhelming," he wrote. "It was also addictive."
Today he's a White hat hacker for large companies.

U Try

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Matthew Bevan and Richard Pryce

Alias: Kuji (Bevan) and Datastream Cowboy (Pryce)
Age: 41 (Bevan) and 35 (Pryce)

This British hacking duo took the U.S. government for a ride when they attacked the Pentagon's network for several weeks in 1994. They copied battlefield simulations from Griffiss Air Force Base in New York, intercepted messages from U.S. agents in North Korea, and got access into a Korean nuclear facility. Pryce was a 16-year-old then, and Bevan was 21 (he's thought to have been tutoring Pryce).

The hacking attacks were especially troublesome for the U.S. government because they couldn't tell if the duo was using their system to hack into a South or North Korea—if it were North Korea, the attacks could've been seen as an act of war. Luckily, South Korea was the hackers' target, and after an international investigation, they were arrested in the following year.

Jonathan James
Alias: c0mrade
Age: 24 (at the time of his death)

Jonathan James was the first juvenile to be convicted and jailed for hacking in the United States. Starting at 15, he hacked into Bell South, the Miami-Dade school system, NASA, and the Department of Defense, and stole software said to have been worth $1.7 million from the government. He intercepted the source code of the International Space Station, which, when discovered, caused NASA to shut down its computers for three weeks, costing $41,000. He was sentenced to six months of house arrest and probation until he turned 18. Even worse? The court required him to write letters of apology to NASA and the Department of Defense.

After Albert Gonzalez's hacker team stole credit and debit card information from TJX in 2007, the Secret Service investigated James, who claimed he had nothing to do with the thefts. Out of fear of being prosecuted for crimes he didn't commit, James killed himself in his shower in May 2008. “I have no faith in the ‘justice’ system," his suicide note said. "Perhaps my actions today, and this letter, will send a stronger message to the public. Either way, I have lost control over this situation, and this is my only way to regain control."

Anonymous
By far the best hacking group to have gotten its style cues from a comic book character, Anonymous is comprised of "hacktivists" who get involved in political and international events. The group originated on 4chan around 2003, when members posting under the alias "anonymous" started the joke that there was a single person with the name Anonymous who's been talking to himself the whole time. The collective was associated with pranks and trolling until 2008, when they launched a coordinated attack on the Church of Scientology under the name "Project Chanology." They've since gotten involved with the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Charlie Hebdo, by leaking documents or taking down the websites. They launched an attack on the KKK in November, which saw them releasing identities and taking down their social media accounts.
Members of Anonymous have fractured off from the main group, forming other collectives like LulzSec. In 2008 Anonymous and LulzSec teamed together for AntiSec, after Arizona passed the immigration enforcement bill SB 1070. (LulzSec disbanded after its leader, Hector Mansegur, ratted out on other members when he was arrested by the FBI)!

Gifted Minds.

Kelvin Poulsen
Alias: Dark Dante
Age: 49

Kevin Poulsen was the first American to be banned from the Internet and computers after being released from prison. In the late '80s and early '90s, Poulsen hacked into phone lines. He became famous when he hacked into the lines of L.A. radio station KIIS FM so that he would be the 102nd caller—winning him a Porsche. When the FBI went looking for him, he went on the run (and when he appeared on the show Unsolved Mysteries, the phone lines for the television station crashed by, you know, coincidence). When he was caught, he served five years in prison and was banned for three years from using the Internet or computers.

He's now a writer for Wired, and wrote an article about sex offenders on MySpace that got one person arrested.

Owen Thor Walker
Alias: AKILL
Age: 27

In 2008, 18-year-old Owen Thor Walker pleaded guilty to six charges of cyber crime. He led an international hacker network that broke into 1.3 million computers, and infiltrated bank accounts to take more than $20 million. He was only 17 when the thefts began, but because he was homeschooled starting at 13, this left him time to learn programming and encryption. Overall he only made $32,000 from his hacking efforts, since he only wrote the code that the other members in the network used to steal the money. He pleaded guilty, wasn't convicted, and only had to payback $11,000. He's now advising companies on online security.

Adrian Lamo
Born: February 20, 1981
Ex-Hacker
Adrian Lamo,a man once hunted by fbi decided to switch careers when he realized the potentials of his skills. He became a news when he hacked into Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and The New York Times. This, although culminated into his arrest, it later helped him gain the batch of an American Threat Analyst. A guy who would hack into top-notch accounts sitting in the spacious and comforting cafeterias, libraries, internet cafes, soon turned Wikileaks suspect Bradley Manning over to FBI. While Manning was arrested for leaking several hundred sensitive US government documents, Lamo went hiding.He suffers from aspergers-somes known as Geek Syndrome.

I want Sabi hack... make I hack NL.

LulzSec

LulzSec or Lulz Security, a high profile, Black Hat hacker group, gained credentials for hacking into Sony, News International, CIA, FBI, Scotland Yard, and several noteworthy accounts. So notorious was the group that when it hacked into News Corporations account, they put across a false report of Rupert Murdoch having passed away. While the group claims to have retired from their vile duties, the motto of the group, “Laughing at your security since 2011!” stays alive. There are assertions of the group having hacked into the websites of the newspapers like The Times and The Sun to post its retirement news. Many, however, claim that this group had taken it upon itself to create awareness about the absence of efficient security against hackers.

Albert Gonzalez
Alias: CumbaJohnny, Segvec, SoupNazi, KingChilli
Born: 1981

Albert Gonzalez founded Shadowcrew.com, which amassed some 4,000 members. Members of the site could buy or sell stolen bank account numbers or fake passports, drivers’ licenses, Social Security cards, credit cards, debit cards, birth certificates, college student identification cards, and health insurance cards. It's said that more than 170 million credit and debit cards were swapped on the site from 2005 to 2007.

Gonzalez, from Florida, wasn't low-key about spending his money; he was known for booking stays in high-class hotels for days and once throwing a $75,000 party. He was charged with having 15 fake bank cards while in New Jersey, but avoided serving time when he gave evidence to the Secret Service about 19 other ShadowCrew members.

He then returned to Miami and, with a team of 10 others, hacked TJX Companies (which own T.J. Maxx and a bunch of other stores), and stole 45 million credit and debit card numbers over 18 months until 2007. He was arrested in May 2008 and won't be out of prison until 2025.