• Famous White Hat Hackers
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White-hat hackers use their powers for good. They help out organizations that might have security breaches before the organizations get hacked. Hacking doesn’t always mean hacking into someone else’s system.

“The use of ‘hacker’ to mean ‘security breaker’ is a confusion on the part of the mass media,” said Richard Matthew Stallman, a well-known white-hat hacker and software developer.

Famous White Hat Hackers

Related: Famous White Hat Hackers Across The Globe. Below you will find our collection of the black hat as well as white hat inspirational, wise, and humorous hacker quotes, hacker sayings, and hacker proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources. Check it out, One-Liner ‘Hacking. Such hackers do not operate alone, they organize themselves into hacker groups. The most famous vigilante hacker group in the world is 'Anonymous', also called 'Anon'. Hacking is a fascinating subject. India's most famous hacker is Ankit Fadia. He is a self-proclaimed white-hat hacker of computer systems. These hackers illegally break into systems for different reasons, but usually not for personal gain or unlawful motives. This means they sometimes violate the law but are still not as vile as black hat hackers. This is legal, rewarded, and follows a good cause. White hat hackers are often hired by companies to test. The pair of famous hackers manipulated their way into multiple military networks including Griffiss Air Force Base, the Defense Information System Agency and the Korean Atomic Research Institute (KARI). By dumping KARI research into American military networks, the duo of black hat hackers very nearly sparked an international incident.

“We hackers refuse to recognize that meaning, and continue using the word to mean someone who loves to program, someone who enjoys playful cleverness or the combination of the two,” Stallman said.

Key Takeaways

• White-hat hackers are hackers that use their powers for good.
• Hackers can be described as “someone who loves to program, someone who enjoys playful cleverness or the combination of the two,” said Richard Matthew Stallman.
• Famous white-hat hackers include the likes of Apple’s Steve Wozniak and Jeff Moss, founder of the Defcon and Black Hat conferences.

1. Tim Berners-Lee

Famous not for hacking but inventing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee nevertheless is undeniably a member of the white-hat hacking camp. As a student at Oxford University, Berners-Lee was banned from using the university computers after he and a friend were caught hacking to gain access to restricted areas.

Berners-Lee moved on and built his own computer from spare parts. After college, he hacked a few other things including HTML.

2. Steve Wozniak

The “other Steve” of Apple, Steve Wozniak got started as a white-hat hacker by making something called blue boxes. Wozniak and Steve Jobs built blue boxes, which essentially hack the phone system so users can make free long-distance calls.

Wozniak and Jobs then sold the blue boxes to their classmates in college. Of course, you know the rest of the story. From blue boxes, they moved on to bigger and better things. Those early days of white-hat hacking are what started them off.

3. Kevin Mitnick

Kevin Mitnick started as a black-hat hacker and ended up serving time after hacking into some of the biggest companies in the world. Now he has left the dark side and works as a consultant and a writer.

Mitnick’s own hacking experience gives him hands-on expertise. An article by TakeDown.com reports that Mitnick’s early hacking days were ambitious and largely successful.

“As a teenage prank in 1982, he allegedly broke into a North American Air Defense Command computer in Colorado Springs, Colo. He once altered a phone program to misdirect federal agents trying to trace his call, sending them barging into the home of a Middle Eastern immigrant watching television,” states the article.

4. Tsutomu Shimomura

Back in the days when Mitnick was a black-hat hacker, he hacked computer-security expert, Tsutomu Shimomura. This didn’t go over well. Shimomura decided to take his own revenge by using his hacking skills to assist the FBI in tracking and locating Mitnick. With Shimomura’s help, they were successful, and Mitnick was arrested. Now they’re on the same team.

5. Jeff Moss

Jeff Moss is better known in the computer world as Dark Tangent, though he’s now well known apart from his hacking handle. Moss founded the Black Hat security conferences, which still draw thousands of computer security experts. Moss also founded Defcon, which is a hugely popular annual hacker conference.

Moss served as the chief security officer for ICANN and as an adviser to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He continues to run the Black Hat security conferences and Defcon.

6. Jon Lech Johansen

Even though they often help big companies protect themselves from malicious hackers, white-hat hackers are far from being passive cogs in the system. White-hat hackers often embrace the idea of independent and freely shared resources, such as open source, open access, and free sharing of software and protocols.

Like Wozniak building boxes to allow college peers to get free long-distance phone calls, Jon Lech Johansen is a younger, newer hacker who has used his skills to aid others in beating a closed system. His hacking skills enabled him to hack an encryption system used on DVD movies.

As a result, users of Linux or other open-source operating systems are able to play DVDs encoded with Microsoft’s proprietary codec, which is supposed to prevent non-Microsoft systems from running the DVDs.

7. Richard Matthew Stallman

Best White Hat Hacker

Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project. The GNU project is both an open-source operating system and a mass collaborative project. According to Stallman, GNU includes programs that are not GNU software but rather programs that were developed by other people for their own purposes. Stallman continues to work on the GNU Project and is an advocate for free and open software.

The Bottom Line

White-hat hacking has become more and more important as businesses and individuals depend on computers and the internet. Since computer security isn’t something all of us understand, it’s vital to have those who do share their expertise.

Five reformed hackers who turned their lives around to help in the fight against cybercrime, leaving their blackhat past behind.

There have been some notorious cybercriminals over the years, but only a select few hackers have swapped ‘black’ hats for ‘white’.

In hacking terms, ‘black’ hats are usually used for the bad guys. They hack the innocent victims, pilfer personal and sensitive data for financial gain and remain largely in the shadows of enterprise IT networks. They’re forever chased by law enforcement.

‘White’ hats, by contrast, are the good guys. They are security researchers, who spend their time hacking to find vulnerabilities, and then inform enterprises and web developers of the changes that need to be made.

There has been a clear distinction between both and there are enough of them around.

Kevin Mitnick

Nokia were one of the companies allegedly targeted by Mitnick in the 90s. (Joe Ravi / Shutterstock.com)

He was 15 when he learned how to bypass the punch card system for Los Angeles city buses

Once described by the US Department of Justice as the “most wanted computer criminal in the United States history”, Mitnick allegedly hacked into the computer networks of some of the world’s top technology and telco companies, including Pacific Bell, Fujitsu, IBM, Motorola and Nokia during the 1990s.

His career all started from a simple case of social engineering; it is reported that he was 15 when he learned how to bypass the punch card system for Los Angeles city buses by finding tickets, and by getting a bus driver to tell him where he could buy his own ticket punch.

Following a highly-publicised pursuit by the FBI, Mitnick was finally arrested in 1995 and confessed to numerous charges as part of a plea-bargain agreement. He subsequently served a prison sentence (12 months in prison, three years of supervised parole) and was released on parole in 2000.

It is even said that he was kept in solitary confinement for eight months because law enforcement were convinced he could launch nuclear missiles by whistling down a payphone.

Today, he works in his own computer security consultancy, Mitnick Security Consulting, which tests out company defences. He is also a public speaker and has published three books.

Kevin Poulsen

Kevin Poulsen, now of Wired, was once dubbed ‘The Hannibal Lecter of computer crime’

A spate of hacks once led to him being called the “Hannibal Lecter of computer crime”

Kevin Poulsen, known online as “Dark Dante”, was also pretty notorious in the 1990s for a spate of hacks that once led to him being called the “Hannibal Lecter of computer crime”.

Poulsen’s most notorious hack was when he took over all the telephone lines of Los Angeles radio station, KIIS-FM, so that he himself would be the 102^nd caller and win the price of a Porsche 944 S2.

He later progressed onto compromising federal networks, where he stole wiretapped information, and this led to him topping the FBI’s most wanted hacker list for a time.

After eventually being caught, Poulsen was sentenced to 51 months in prison and had to pay $56,000.

He has since built out a successful career as an investigative security journalist. He is now senior editor for Wired News and has helped law enforcement with some notable cybercriminal investigations, including one that resulted in the identification and arrest of 744 sex offenders on social networking platform MySpace. Poulsen and Aaron Swartz co-developed SecureDrop, the open-source software for secure communications between journalists and sources.

Robert Tappan Morris

World Most Famous Hacker

The worm was first analysed by personnel at Berkeley and at MIT (EQRoy / Shutterstock.com)

He became the first person to have ever been convicted due to his violation of the Computer Fraud Abuse Act of the United States.

Computer scientist Robert Tappan Morris was a student at Cornell when he released one of the first computer worms, the Morris Worm, onto the internet in 1988.

He was caught, arrested and sentenced to three years’ probation, 400 hours of community service, and ordered to pay a fine of $10,000. He became the first person to have ever been convicted due to his violation of the Computer Fraud Abuse Act of the United States.

However, since his release in 1994, Morris has gone on to use his expertise for good, co-founding online store Viaweb (bought by Yahoo! for $45 million in 1998) and seed fund Y Combinator.

He later joined the faculty in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became technical advisor for Meraki Networks, before the company was acquired by Cisco in 2012.

Sven Jaschan

Jaschan was studying at a computer science school in Rotenberg, Germany, at the time of his arrest.

Sven Jaschan was found guilty of writing the Netsky and Sasser computer worms back in 2004, when he was still just a teenager. These viruses were big news, and were said to be responsible for around 70 percent of malware spreading across the internet at the time.

Jaschan received a suspended sentence – he was a few days before his 18th birthday when arrested – and later three years jail time for his crimes. He was then hired by German security company SecurePoint in 2004, a move which caused much commotion at the time, even causing the firm to lose business.

Leonard Rose

Leonard Rose was found guilty of stealing Unix codes from AT&T. (Ken Wolter / Shutterstock.com)

White Hat Hacking For Beginners

Bloomberg described it at the time as “the largest-ever crackdown on computer crime”

Leonard Rose was convicted of wire fraud of 1991, after he was found guilty of stealing Unix source codes from AT&T as well as distributing two Trojan Horse malware programs which enabled him to gain access to numerous computer systems at companies across the US.

Famous Black Hat Hacker

Rose was also accused of being the ringleader of the Legion of Doom hacking group, which stole log-in information and other personal details from a number of websites in the 1980s and 1990s. The FBI finally caught up with the group but only after the “Operation Sundevil” take-down in 1991 which reportedly involved “50 gun-toting Secret Service agents” raiding hacker homes in 14 different states. Bloomberg described it at the time as “the largest-ever crackdown on computer crime”.

Famous White Hat Hackers In Tamilnadu

In more recent years, Rose founded and created the Full Disclosure mailing list, used by many companies to disclose and detail security vulnerabilities, and now appears to work as a security expert for a company based in New Mexico.