• Who took down some of the biggest websites in the world on a dare when he was 15?
Who got his home raided by a tactical FBI team at the age of 14?
These are some of the youngest hackers that have ever been found.
15 – CyFi • CyFi is a 10-year-old girl who was bored
with the snail-like pace of farming sim games.
So she found exploits in the way the game tracks time.
• The exploit was known as a “zero-day” exploit, because she gave the developers zero
days to react to it.
In other words, she found the exploit before the developers even knew it existed.
14 – Reuben Paul • At the age of 11, Reuben Paul addressed
a cyber security audience with a teddy bear.
• Using a Raspberry Pi, he hacked an internet and Bluetooth-enabled teddy bear, and downloaded
a bunch of numbers from the people in the audience.
• In addition to being an accomplished hacker, Reuben is the youngest American to ever become
a black belt in Shaolin Kung Fu. 13 – Betsy Davies
• Betsy Davies is 7 years old.
And after watching a video tutorial, it took her exactly 10 minutes and 54 seconds to hack
a public wi-fi network.
• This was done as part of a demonstration about how embarrassingly easy it is to exploit
a public wi-fi-network with a “man in the middle” attack.
• In under 11 minutes, Betsy completed a hack that would have allowed her to monitor
every single device on that network.
12 – Nicholas Allegra • Nicholas Allegra is best-known for his
“JailBreakMe” tools for iOS operating systems.
• At age 19, he figured out not only how to jailbreak iPhones and iPads, but how to
mass-produce the process to make it usable by non-hackers.
• Consequently, Apple hired him as a security expert.
And then they let him go.
He immediately caught back on with Google to work on Android.
11 – George Hotz • When the iPhone first came out, it was
exclusive to the AT&T network in the United States.
• So if you didn’t have AT&T as your carrier, no iPhone for you.
• George Hotz, better known as “Geohot,” decided to do something about that.
• At age 17, he engineered his iPhone to work with T-Mobile, thereby creating the world’s
first unlocked iPhone.
10 – Tim Berners-Lee • Tim Berners-Lee isn’t really famous
for being an internet hacker.
He’s famous for the internet itself.
• He invented the World Wide Web in 1989, but he’s a white-hat hacker at his core.
As a student, he got himself banned from university computer access at Oxford after he hacked
server access for himself.
• Before that, he created his first computer with an old television, an M6800 processor,
and a soldering iron.
9 – Kevin Mitnick • Kevin Mitnick began his hacking career
as a teenager, hacking everything from multinational corporations to a McDonald’s Drive-thru
speaker.
• He was caught and sent to prison in the 1990s for five years.
Several months of that sentence was spent in solitary confinement, because the judge
feared that he would be able to start a nuclear war if he whistled into a telephone the right
way.
• Judges don’t really understand how hacking works.
8 – Sven Jaschan • Sven Jaschan was 17 years old when he
created the Sasser worm, which exploited a vulnerability in Windows 2000 and Windows
XP.
• That worm did millions of dollars in damages, including a number of cancelled flights with
Delta Airlines, whose computers were overtaken with the worm.
7 – Richard Pryce • Richard Pryce was a 16-year-old student
getting a D in his computer science class when he earned a reputation as the “Datastream
Cowboy.”
• The British teen used an underpowered computer in his bedroom to hack systems at
NASA and US Air Force bases.
• His activities were considered to have done more damage than the KGB, and at one
point, he was considered the top threat to U.S. security by the Pentagon.
6 – Matthew Weigman • The fact that Matthew Weigman was a young
hacker is one of the least noteworthy things about him.
• He became one of the most accomplished phone con-men alive by the time he was about
17.
And he’s blind.
• It’s not the same type of hacking you’d expect to see, but he has still used his memory
and manipulative powers to infiltrate the upper levels of a number of major organizations.
5 – Mafiaboy Michael Calce • Michael Calce, better known as “Mafiaboy,”
once took down Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, CNN, and a host of other websites when he was 15.
• And he basically did it on a dare.
• He was eventually caught and plead guilty to 56 charges related to his hacking activities.
4 – Jonathan James • In 2000, Jonathan James became the first
juvenile to be sentenced to serve time for hacking.
• He hacked the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA, downloading files and shutting down
some computers for as much as three weeks at a time.
• Had he been an adult when he did it, instead of 16 years old, he would like have served
over 10 years in prison.
• Instead, he got 6 months in juvenile hall.
3 – James Kosta • When James Kosta was 13, he had a computer
business pulling in 15 hundred dollars a month and an 18-year-old girlfriend.
• His parents tried to get him to give up on his business and his girlfriend and concentrate
on school, so he took them to court and won the right to live independently of them.
• At age 14, he was arrested for illegal hacking in an FBI raid.
• After his release, he worked for the FBI, and now runs a successful video game studio.
2 – 12-year-old Canadian boy • Because of Canada’s youth protection
laws, we don’t know the name or identity of the 12-year-old in question here.
• But in 2012, this boy attacked several websites belonging to the Canadian government
as a part of Anonymous.
He apparently also collected data from those sites, which he exchanged for video games.
• He was 14 when he plead guilty to the charges, making him the youngest hacker to
be charged in Canada.
1 - Kristoffer von Hassel • It’s hard to say if Kristoffer von Hassel
is some sort of freak prodigy, or if he’s just lucky.
• But he found a backdoor past the lock screen on his dad’s phone when he was just
a year old.
• Then, when he was five, he bypassed the parental lock on his dad’s Xbox, exposing
a critical security exploit just by putting in blank spaces.
• Microsoft added the boy to their list of security researchers.
They gave him 50 dollars, four free games, and a year of Xbox Live
for his trouble.