Nine Greatest Hackers Of 2013

Code Kill Group takes a look at 2013’s hacking hall of shame members which include Anonymous and the Blackhole cybercrime gang apart from state-sponsored groups. 

Last year saw a series of hacks that were committed across the countries. These were carried out by groups who are well known for other hacking events As cited on informationweek.com, let’s take a look at nine hallmark hacking events of 2013 below- 1.Anonymous hacking collective - The group commenced the year with a legal bang by backing a White House "We the People" petition which argued that DDoS a/tt//acks must be protected as a form of free speech, for using it to protest injustice. Then the group’s Operation Last Resort meant hacking the US Sentencing Commission website establishing sentencing policies and practices for the federal courts in order to include a game of Asteroids for protesting federal prosecutors having threatened Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz with a 35-year prison sentence for downloading millions of documents from the JSTOR archive, which drove Swartz to commit suicide. Anonymous earned great praise in October for its Operation Maryville that highlighted the case of two Missouri girls, ages 13 and 14, who were both allegedly raped last year with the prosecutors dropping charges against one of the girl's alleged attackers. 2.Stratfor hacker Jeremy Hammond - Jeremy Hammond hacked into the private intelligence contractor Strategic Forecasting in the latter part of 2011 and posted the stolen files to a server which now appears to have belonged to the FBI. The stolen information was distributed by him to WikiLeaks, that published it as part of its Global Intelligence Files program. Hammond was indicted in 2012 and in May 2013, he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to engage in computer hacking. Once Hammond had pleaded guilty and Judge Loretta Preska sentenced him in November, his supporters launched a letter-writing campaign in pursuit of leniency, arguing in part that Hammond had been entrapped by the former LulzSec leader Sabu, who'd become an FBI informant six months before Hammond hacked Stratfor, and who was being monitored around the clock by handlers at the bureau. 3.Ex-LulzSec leader Sabu - Sabu whose real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur, the former Anonymous participant and ex-leader of LulzSec, was quietly arrested by the FBI on June 7, 2011. Monsegur who instantly turned into an informant has been assisting the bureau ever since. The assistance included collecting evidence and in certain cases entrapping members of Anonymous and LulzSec, and also assisting the FBI in identifying system vulnerabilities and exploits. Hammond stated that "What the United States could not accomplish legally, it used Sabu, and by extension, me and my co-defendants, to accomplish illegally." 4.Chinese APT1 attack crew - The alert was sounded in February when the security firm Mandiant published a report into a group operating from China known as APT1 which it stated had used spear phishing attacks to compromise 141 businesses in 20 different industries. Instead of being contract or state-sponsored hackers, Mandiant stated, APT1 was actually part of the People's Liberation Army Unit 61398, which it characterized as an elite military hacking unit. 5.Syrian Electronic Army - The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is another band of state-affiliated attackers. This is allied with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It serves as an online propaganda wing for Assad, it has hacked many sites in 2013 which range from National Public Radio and Reuters to the BBC and the Onion for protesting perceived reporting accuracies or slights against Assad. 6.Blackhole founder Paunch - The case of 27-year-old Paunch known as Dmitry Fedotov in news reports was arrested by police in the Russian city of Togliatti in October, along with 12 of his alleged cohorts. They are charged with building and operating -- and in Paunch's case, masterminding -- the well-known Blackhole crimeware toolkit that first came in the summer of 2010. 7.US bank DDoS attackers - The series of DDoS attacks against US financial institutions was started in September 2012 by a group known as Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. The attacks have gone on with the group announcing the fourth wave of attacks in July 2013. Ending 2013, the attacks against Wall Street websites are continuing, which has earned the hacking group an accolade of sorts. 8.Federal Bureau of Investigation - The FBI's cracking of the Tor onion-routing system this summer, as a portion of a year-long investigation into a child pornography distribution ring. The Tor network is beloved by privacy aficionados and activists as it can be utilized for hiding not only data flowing over the Internet, but also who's communicating with whom. Also, Tor's hidden services marked by a dot-onion (.onion) domain name can make a website reachable only via the Tor network. 9.National Security Agency –As per documents leaked by Snowden, the agency's Tailored Access Operations division utilized malware for hacking into 50,000 PCs for surveillance purposes by 2012. As per the documents, the agency's Special Source Operations division has been hacking into Internet backbones as part of the digital dragnet. The surveillance operation was built for recording huge quantities of information flowing across the Internet.