Worst hackers ever?

We always hear about the big data breaches, the most devastating viruses, and the most denying of the denial-of-service attacks. But for every hacker with that level of deviousness, there are a thousand wannabes out there. Some get ridiculed, some get arrested.

 

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1. “Virus” targets Whac-A-Mole

There are so many things wrong with this headline. The first and most glaring is that it wasn’t a “virus” at all, though I have no doubt that’s what the police told the Orlando Sentinel. They allege that a programmer wrote code in the Whac-A-Mole software “to make them shut down after a pre-determined number of plays” so that he could charge the company to fix it. It’s not a virus, which would have the ability to travel from machine to machine; it’s just… well, sabotage.

And secondly… Whac-A-Mole? Really?

 

 

2. YouN00b

Jesse William McGraw was a security guard at a Dallas hospital. One night in 2009, he decided to install some botnet code on a nurse’s station computer. The thing is, he filmed the whole thing, with himself as the star, and pretended to break into the hospital. He then posted the video on YouTube. Surprisingly, the FBI has access to YouTube. Long story short, last year he pled guilty to charges that he broke into his employer’s computers.

3. ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO ME

This text [warning: foul language] has been kicking around on the Web for years, supposedly the result of an exchange on Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. In it, a blustering hacker wannabe threatens to take down a rival’s machine using unidentified hacker software: “i have a program where i enter your ip and you’re dead.”

He then asks for the rival’s IP address, and is told that it’s “127.0.0.1.” The hacker gleefully describes how he is now wiping out each of the victim’s hard drives, one by one:

“you idiout your hard drive g: is deleted… and d: is at 45% you idiot lolololol… you’re so stupid never give your ip on the internet”

And of course, he didn’t. The IP address 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address, the one pointing right back at yourself. A moment later the hacker disappeared off the IRC.

4. World of Whoopscraft

Steps to success:

1. Break into World of Warcraft user account
2. Use stolen credit card to set up recurring payments
3. Enjoy hours and hours of play on someone else’s dime
4. Realize that there should have been a step 1a, where you change the password on the account

5. Studying them… for science

If you drink most (but not all) of a Coke and leave the bottle out on a picnic table in late summer, chances are that after a while you’ll find a yellow jacket or two inside it, attracted by the Coke syrup but unable to navigate out of the bottle.

Information security has an equivalent called a “honeypot,” which is basically a system set up to attract would-be hackers and make them waste their time trying to hack something that has no value and no way out.

Normally, you would just screw the cap on top of the bottle and throw it in the recycling bin, but sometimes security folks get a kick out of watching the clueless hackers bounce around in there and make sport out of trying to figure out what it is the hackers are attempting and why. Heck, why not even set it to music and post it on YouTube?

6. Worst hacker ever

As a bonus, this amusing image (purportedly from Facebook) has been making the rounds, and it’s good for a chuckle.