This essay is going to scare you. There is a better-than-average chance that, at some point in the last several years, your personal information was stolen. Not something small like a credit card account, but the good stuff, your Social Security number coupled with your birthdate.
Tommy DeVoss used to break into websites illicitly. But after serving time for his crimes, he now uses his skills to earn an honest living. Through arrangements known as bug bounty programs, companies pay him to find security holes in their systems. He’s now earned more than $1 million in this emerging profession.
While diabetics anxiously awaited the release of commercial systems, tech-savvy diabetics and their loved ones worked on do-it-yourself systems. How could a bunch of hackers, working in their free time, create something medical manufacturing companies had yet to put on the market?
When I started shopping around for my ransomware service, the community was still grieving GandCrab. GandCrab wasn’t the first Ransomware As A Service (RaaS) but its overwhelming success had demonstrated the model’s commercial potential.
At 22, he saved the internet from what was the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. It was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry’s global threat immediately. Then he was arrested by the FBI.
A lottery loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.
North Korean hackers have carried out a systematic effort to target financial institutions all over the world. They scored $80 million by tricking a network into routing funds to Sri Lanka and the Philippines and then using a “money mule” to pick up the cash.
Ladar Levison built an encrypted email service called Lavabit that counted a prominent figure among its users: Edward Snowden. When the FBI demanded Levison decrypt Snowden’s communications, he had two options, either hand over the encryption key or destroy his servers. He chose the latter.
Meet the hackers who are working with investigative journalists to expose organized crime and corruption by some of the world’s most sinister governments. Those governments are going to great lengths to shut down investigative reporting through cyber attacks and other intimidation tactics.
In one of the largest state-sponsored computer hacks ever detected, Qatar’s proxies cyberattacked more than 1,400 high-status and ordinary citizens who were exercising their free-speech rights in democracies across North America, the Middle East, Asia and Europe, according to U.S. court filings.
