Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo, then 20 years old, altered a Reuters story in 2001 by adding a false quotation that was ascribed to then Attorney General John Ashcroft using an unsecured content management system at Yahoo. Lamo frequently breached computer systems before alerting the media and his victims. He occasionally assisted in the clean-up to increase their security. But as Wired notes, Lamo went too far in 2002 when he hacked The New York Times intranet, listed himself as an expert source, and started researching well-known public people. Because Lamo tended to travel the streets with little more than a bag and frequently had no set location, he acquired the nickname “The Homeless Hacker.”
Albert Gonzalez
Gonzalez, also known as “soupnazi,” started out as the “troubled pack leader of computer geeks” at his Miami high school, according to the New York Daily News. He subsequently started participating in the illegal online marketplace Shadowcrew.com, where he was regarded as one of its greatest hackers and moderators. Gonzalez was detained in New York at the age of 22 for stealing information from millions of card accounts in order to commit debit card fraud. He joined the Secret Service as an informant to avoid going to jail, which ultimately assisted in the indictment of other Shadowcrew members.
Gonzalez maintained his illegal activities while working as a paid informant. Gonzalez stole more than 180 million credit card accounts from businesses including OfficeMax, Dave and Buster’s, and Boston Market with the help of a number of accomplices. Gonzalez’s 2005 attack on US retailer TJX, according to The New York Times Magazine, was the first instance of a repeated credit data breach. This well-known hacker and his crew established back doors in multiple business networks using a straightforward SQL injection, and they stole an estimated $256 million from TJX alone. Gonzalez was victimized in a way that the federal prosecution before his sentence in 2015 described as “unparalleled.”
