 | Johan Helsingius, also known as Julf, was the manager of the world’s most famous anonymous remailer, penet.fi. He eventually shut it down in September 1996 because police claimed the Church of Scientology suffered damages due to people leaking their secrets while concealing them using Helsingius’s remailing service. The service operated solely on a 486 computer and a 200-megabyte hard drive. |
| John Draper, also known as Cap’n Crunch, was the originator of the phreaking gimmick of using the plastic straws in cereal boxes to make free phone calls. This earned him the reputation as a “phreaking king.” As a teenager, he tried to make the phone return every coin he inserted. His favorite tool was the whistle from the Cap’n Crunch cereal box. This whistle generated a sound wave of 2600 hertz, sufficient to make a phone call, but it required the use of a “bluebox” (which granted free calls). |  |
 | Kevin Mitnick , also known as “Condor,” is perhaps the world’s most well-known cracker. Mitnick started as a phone phreak in his early years and has cracked every type of site imaginable, including military sites, financial companies, software companies, and other technology firms. (At the age of 10, he cracked the North American Aerospace Defense Command.) He was caught for hacking into the computer of a Japanese security expert, Tsutomu Shimomura, leading to an FBI manhunt. He is currently banned from using or approaching computers. He has since been released from prison and is writing a book on hacker security. |
| Vladimir Levin, a graduate of St. Petersburg Tekhnologichesky University, is a mathematician with a troubled past. He was involved in a heist with Russian crackers who stole $10 million from Citibank’s computers. He was eventually arrested by Interpol at Heathrow Airport in 1995. |  |
 | Mark Abene , better known as Phiber Optik, possessed an extraordinary talent for figuring out telephone systems. His intelligence was so remarkable that he spent a year in jail attempting to send a message to a fellow cracker, only to have it intercepted. He was popular with teenagers due to his intelligence and good personality. The New York Magazine and the Manhattan Club even listed him as one of the 100 smartest people in the city. He was particularly fond of Ken’s mashed potatoes. |
| Kevin Poulsen has a background very similar to Mitnik. Poulsen is best known for his mysterious ability to control the Pacific Bell telephone system (he once used this ability to win a radio competition with a Porsche as the prize; he could control the telephone lines, thus winning the competition). He infiltrated almost every type of site, but he was interested in specially protected information. He was later imprisoned for 5 years. Poulsen was released in 1996 and has made a remarkable comeback. |  |
 | Robert T. Morris, also known by his alias rtm, is the son of the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, part of the National Security Agency (NSA). He graduated from Cornell University and gained notoriety for the 1998 internet worm outbreak that infected thousands of computers and caused them to malfunction. The tool he used as a teenager was a Bell Labs superuser account. |
| Justin Tanner Peterson, known as Agent Steal, is perhaps most notorious for his credit card cracking activities. Peterson appears to have been driven by money rather than curiosity, and his lack of morality has brought ruin to himself and others. For example, when caught, he abandoned his friends, including Kevin Poulsen, to negotiate with the FBI in exchange for his release. He later escaped and continued his crimes. |
