- All the anti-virus and private browsers in the world
won't help you this time.
(upbeat dance music)
Hacking has gotten a lot worse over the last decade,
with some hackers able to bring
entire billion-dollar corporations to their knees.
But whether these hacks were done as revenge of some kind
or just for the laughs, they were all unstoppable.
These are the 10 most devastating computer hacks
of all time.
Number one is the Sony hack.
Let's start off with what is considered
to be one of the most damaging hacks of all time.
On November 24, 2014, Sony Pictures was the victim
of a well-planned hack
which infected multiple employees' computers with malware
and, according to the hackers,
led to the release of 100 terabytes of data,
including employee information,
secrets including how much actors were paid,
and even unreleased films.
The hack was carried out by a group
known as Guardians of the Peace,
who demanded that Sony cancel all screenings
of the Seth Rogen and James Franco film The Interview.
Despite the massive amount of damage done,
nobody was ever caught for the hack.
It was totally worth it, though.
It was a funny movie.
Number two is the Conficker Worm.
First discovered in early November 2008,
the Conficker Worm was a virus
that targeted the Windows operating system
by exploiting vulnerabilities in the code,
and linking it to other systems to make a massive net
controlled by the hackers who made it.
Conficker infected millions of computers
in over 190 countries,
including government PCs such as the Manchester, UK
City Council desktops, the French Navy computer network,
and over 100 of Germany's armed forces systems.
The name Conficker is said to be a combination
of the words configure and a German curse word.
It's been said that the virus was created in the Ukraine,
though to this day it hasn't been verified
and no arrests have ever been made.
It got so serious that on February 13, 2009,
Microsoft offered a $250,000 reward
for the arrest of the Conficker Worm's creator.
But to this day, nobody has ever been able to claim it.
Number three is Heartland.
On November 20, 2009, Heartland Payment Systems
announced that their network had been hacked.
Heartland, a credit card processing company
located in New Jersey,
claimed the cyber-attack occurred on multiple occasions
between December 26, 2007, and the day of the announcement.
According to the US government,
over 130 million credit cards were compromised,
though Heartland went onto say
that they'd lost $2.6 million
and had absolutely no idea how many
of the hundreds of millions of cards
that they processed had been copied.
28-year-old Albert Gonzalez
and a gang of Russian hackers associated with him
pulled off the hack in subsequent heists.
Gonzalez was arrested and extradited to the United States,
and sentenced multiple times as he'd also been responsible
for the hacking of companies like TJX and 7-11,
as well as stealing upwards of $300 million in total.
He was handed a 20-year total sentence
for what proved to be one of the biggest hacks
in US history.
Number four is the D.o.D. attack.
Being the first juvenile under 18 years old
to ever be imprisoned for committing a cybercrime
is really a title that you probably should not be proud of.
But if you're also a teenager
who practically brought the entire United States
to its knees, you just might be.
Jonathan James was only 15 years old
when he managed to successfully hack
into some major systems at the Department of Defense,
specifically computers
at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
In July of 1999, James accessed over 3,000 messages
and emails between the DTRA employees,
and even compromised the systems
that controlled the physical environment
on the International Space Station.
This breach shut down NASA's computers
for nearly three weeks,
and it cost the agency over $41,000
just to flush out James's code and fix their systems.
After his release, James was constantly in fear
that other cybercrimes would be falsely blamed on him,
and this led to his suicide on May 18, 2008.
Number five is Court Venture.
This hacker not only scammed a massive company,
but ended up helping some really bad people
steal the identities of over 13,670 American citizens.
In March of 2012, Experian, a global corporation
which specializes in credit and marketing services,
acquired a business called Court Ventures,
which aided in personal data retrieval.
During this time, 22-year-old Vietnamese hacker
Hieu Minh Ngo used his computer skills
to breach Court Ventures security and pose as an investor.
He was given access
to millions of Americans' personal information,
and used this access to sell their identities
online to over 1,300 buyers.
He managed to make nearly $2 million doing this,
that is, until his arrest on February of 2013.
On July 14, 2015, he was sentenced to 13 years in prison.
Experian has been trying
to explain their way out of this mess
ever since with little success.
How exactly do you explain that a young 22-year-old
was better than your entire security system?
You just, you're done.
Number six is Project Rivolta.
At only 15 years old, cyber genius Michael Calce
was barely old enough to shave,
let alone hack advanced programming code.
But that didn't stop him from taking down
some of the internet's most visited websites.
Between February 7 and February 14 of 2000,
the West Coast, Quebec youth,
who went by the hacker name MafiaBoy online,
launched a number of distributed denial of service attacks,
which overloaded and eventually shut down popular sites
including eBay, Amazon, CNN, and Dell.
He even managed to take down Yahoo!,
which held the title at the time
of the world's number one search engine.
Calce called the hacking operation Project Rivolta,
and was said to consider the entire thing too easy.
Sources say that soon after the hacks were committed,
he simply settled down to watch the movie Goodfellas,
only to have police come knocking at his door.
He was sentenced on September 12, 2001,
to eight months in open custody.
Number seven is the Morris Worm.
In the late '80s, the internet was barely known
outside of military networks, universities,
and other education and government facilities.
However, just how big it actually was
wasn't precisely known,
especially as it was still growing at the time.
So on November 2, 1988,
Cornell University graduate student Robert Tappan Morris
developed a digital worm virus
that could break into every computer
that it could find on the web
and report back that it existed,
mapping out a huge network.
Launched at a computer at MIT,
the Morris Worm self-replicated,
infecting thousands upon thousands of systems
and taking down multiple networks' connectivity.
Though he designed it as a non-damaging worm,
the virus would infect a system multiple times,
severely slowing it down.
According to the United States
Government Accountability Office,
the accidental attack caused as much
as $10 million in damage,
and made Robert the first person to be convicted
under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Number eight is Melissa.
On March 26, 1999, 30-year-old David L. Smith
of Aberdeen Township, New Jersey,
unleashed a monster onto the internet
that became a bigger nightmare
that even he could've ever imagined that it would become.
Named after a stripper
that he'd fallen in love with in Florida,
the Melissa virus acted intelligently,
spreading to other computers
through a Word document and emails.
Corrupting Microsoft Outlook, Melissa would send itself
to 50 people in the user's contact list,
and then once opened would then send itself again
to 50 more of their contacts.
In the end, it was estimated
that she did more than $80 million of damage
and caused multiple companies, such as Microsoft and Intel,
to shut down their internet connections temporarily.
Smith pled guilty to the creation of Melissa
on December 10, 1999,
and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
But lucky for him, he wormed his way out
as he only served 20 months behind bars
and had to pay a $5,000 fine.
Number nine is Project Chanology.
By now, you've likely heard of the hacking group Anonymous.
Well, something that you might not know
is that one of their first ever
publicly-known hacktivism cyber-assaults
started on January 16, 2008,
when the group took on the Church of Scientology
in an attempt to save people
from their controversial religion
by reversing the brainwashing.
Dubbed Project Chanology,
Anonymous launched a massive DDoS attack on Scientology.org,
which actually took the website offline briefly.
On January 21, 2008,
the public saw Anonymous for the very first time
when they released a video called Message to Scientology.
In it, they declared their intent
and accused the church of trying to censor a video
of possibly the most famous of their believers, Tom Cruise,
making ridiculous claims
about what the religion was capable of.
It's bad enough the guy's jumping on couches,
now he's making claims about alien gods.
Religion's weird.
And number 10 is Spamhaus.
This is one of the absolute most devastating hacks
that is considered by many security firms,
programmers, and cyber-activists
to be the largest distributed denial of service attack
in the history of hacking.
Started on March 19, 2013, Spamhaus,
a Geneva, Switzerland-based spam prevention service,
came under attack from hackers using nearly 100,000 servers,
the most ever used for such a cause according to records.
The action also had the honor
of using the most bandwidth ever used for a cyber-attack,
at 300 gigabits per second.
Massive sections of Europe
lost internet connectivity and speed,
and the attack went on for days.
Sources claim that the hack was carried out by CyberBunker,
a hosting company run out of an abandoned NATO bunker
in the Netherlands,
and criminal gangs from Eastern Europe in Russia,
with the goal of shutting down Spamhaus,
who they simply didn't like.
See, this is why you do not get on the bad side of hackers.
I love you, hackers.
You're wonderful, you're all great.
So those were the 10 most devastating
computer hacks of all time.
But I want to know from you,
what other hacks do you know of
that deserve to be on this list?
Leave your comment below
because I'll be reading through them,
and I'm going to pin the best one to the top.
But as always, thank you guys so much for coming by today.
Remember to come back tomorrow and every weekday
at exactly 3:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
because I'll have a brand new video for you.
I'll see you then.