The Complete History of Hacking

[1990] Kevin Poulsen’s now-infamous incident with KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. In 1990 the station ran the “Win a Porsche by Friday” contest, with a $50,000 Porsche given to the 102nd caller. Kevin and his associates, stationed at their computers, seized control of the station’s 25 telephone lines, blocking out all calls but their own. Then he dialed the 102nd call — and later collected his Porsche 944.

[1990 Jan 15] AT&T’s long-distance telephone switching system crashed. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted. Hackers where first suspected of causing the crash but later AT&T engineers discovered the “culprit” was a bug in AT&T’s own software.

[1990 Jan 18] Chicago task force raids an alleged computer hacker Craig Neidorf (’Knight Lightning’) in St. Louis.

[1990 Feb] U.S. Secret Service raid an alleged computer hacker Len Rose (’Terminus’) in Maryland. Len somehow got his hands on System V 3.2 AT&T Unix Source Code, including the source login.c

[1990 Feb 21] Chicago Task Force raids the home of Robert Izenberg, an alleged computer hacker in Austin.

[1990 Mar 1] Chicago task force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc. Reportedly, workers Loyd Blankenship (’The Mentor’) and Chris Goggans (’Erik Bloodaxe’), had ties to a hacker group (LOD) that the Justice Department was investigating. Finding a rulebook to a game called G.U.R.P.S. CYBERPUNK, raiders interpreted the findings as a tutorial on computer hacking and proceeded to seize equipment and documents found at the site. Steve Jackson Games, Inc. prevailed in an ensuing legal battle, however their equipment was never returned in its entirety.

[1990 May 7] May 7 through Wednesday, May 9, the United States Secret Service and the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau implement Operation Sundevil computer hacker raids in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco.

[1990 Mar 7] A 24 year-old Denver man, Richard G. Wittman Jr., has admitted breaking into a NASA computer system. In a plea bargain, Wittman plead guilty to a single count of altering information - a password inside a federal computer.

[1990 Apr] Between April 1990 and May 1991, computer hackers from the Netherlands penetrated 34 DOD sites. At many of the sites, the hackers had access to unclassified, sensitive information on such topics as military personnel–personnel performance reports, travel information, and personnel reductions; logistics–descriptions of the type and quantity of equipment being moved; and weapons systems development data.

[1990 May] At least four British clearing banks are being blackmailed by a mysterious group of computer hackers who have broken into their central computer systems. The hackers demanded substantial sums of money in return for showing the banks how their systems where penetrated. One computer expert described their level of expertise and knowledge of the clearing bank computer systems as “truly frightening”.

[1991] The Internet, having been established to link the military and educational institutions banned access to businesses. That ban is lifted this year.

[1991] Rumors circulate about the Michelangelo virus, a program expected to crash computers on March 6, 1992, the artist’s 517th birthday. Doomsday passes without much incident.

[1991 Feb] DOS version of AOL released.

[1991 Apr 11] Kevin Poulsen (’Dark Dante’) arrested for breaking into Pacific Bell phone systems.

[1991 Jul] Justin Petersen (’Agent Steal’ and ‘Eric Heinz’) arrested for breaking into TRW, stealing credit cards.

[1991 Aug 6] Tim Berners-Lee’s Usenet announcement of the World Wide Web project.

[1991 Sep] Justin Petersen released from prison to help FBI track hacker Kevin Mitnick.

[1991 Sep 17] Linus Torvalds publicly releases Linux version 0.01. While a computer science student at the University of Helsinki Linus created the Linux operating. Linus originally named his operating system Freax.

[1991 Oct 5] Linus Torvalds decides to announce the availability of a free minix-like kernel called Linux on Usenet.

[1992] Masters of Deception (MOD) phone phreakers busted via wiretaps.

[1992] Morty Rosenfeld convicted after hacking into TRW, stealing credit card numbers and selling credit reports.

[1992 Jan 29] Minix creator, Andy Tanenbaum, posts the infamous LINUX is obsolete newsgroup posting on comp.os.minix. Later, Linux creator Linus Torvalds quickly responds to the posting.

[1992 Nov] Kevin Mitnick cracks into California Department of Motor Vehicles.

[1993 Mar 1] Microsoft releases Windows NT.

[1993 Jun] Slackware, by Patrick Volkerding, becomes the first commercial standalone distribution of Linux.

[1993 Jul 9] The first Def Con hacking conference takes place in Las Vegas. The conference is meant to be a one-time party to say good-bye to BBSs (now replaced by the Web), but the gathering is so popular it becomes an annual event.

[1993 Aug] Justin Petersen arrested for stealing computer access equipment.

[1993 Oct 28] Randal Schwartz uses Crack at Intel to crack passwords, later found guilty under an Oregon computer crime law, and sentenced.

[1993 Dec] FreeBSD version 1.0 is released.

[1994] Red Hat is founded.

[1994] Linux 1.0 is released.

[1994 Jan 12] Mark Abene (’Phiber Optik’) starts his one year sentence. As a founding member of the Masters of Deception, Mark inspired thousands of teenagers around the country to “study” the internal workings of our nation’s phone system. A federal judge attempted to “send a message” to other hackers by sentencing Mark to a year in federal prison, but the message got garbled: Hundreds of well-wishers attended a welcome-home party in Mark’s honor at a Manhattan Club. Soon after, New York magazine dubbed him one of the city’s 100 smartest people. Other MOD members: Elias Ladopoulos (’Acid Phreak’), Paul Stira (’Scorpion’), John Lee (’Corrupt’), Allen Wilson (’Wing’), ‘The Seeker’, ‘HAC’, ‘Red Knight’, ‘Lord Micro’ and Julio Fernandez (’Outlaw’).

[1994 Mar 23] 16-year-old music student Richard Pryce (’Datastream Cowboy’) is arrested and charged with breaking into hundreds of computers including those at the Griffiths Air Force base, NASA and the Korean Atomic Research Institute. The Times of London reported that knowing he was about to be arrested, Richard “curled up on the floor and cried.” Pryce later pled guilty to 12 hacking offenses and fined $1,800. Later, Matthew Bevan (’Kuji’), mentor to Pryce was finally tracked down and arrested. The charges against Bevan were later dropped and now he works as a computer security consultant.

[1994 Jun 13] Vladimir Levin, a 23-year-old, led a Russian hacker group in the first publicly revealed international bank robbery over a network. Stealing around 10 million dollars from Citibank, which claims to have recovered all but $400,000 of the money. Levin was later caught and sentenced to 3 years in prison.

[1994 Aug] Justin Petersen electronically steals $150k from Heller Financial.

[1994 Sep] Netcom’s (bought by MindSpring, MindSpring then bought by Earthlink) credit card database was on-line and accessible to the unauthorized.

[1994 Dec 25] Kevin Mitnick (supposedly) cracks into Tsutomu Shimomura’s computers. Mitnick was first suspected of hacking into Tsutomu’s computers in 1994 but an unknown Israeli hacker (friend to Mitnick) was later suspected. The Israeli hacker was thought to be looking for the Oki cell phone disassembler written by Shimomura and wanted by Mitnick.

[1995 Jan 27] Kevin Mitnick cracks into the Well; puts Shimomura’s files and Netcom (bought by MindSpring, MindSpring then bought by Earthlink) credit card numbers there.

[1995 Feb] Ex-LOD member, Corey Lindsly (’Mark Tabas’) was the major ringleader in a computer hacker organization, known as the ‘Phonemasters’, whose ultimate goal was to own the telecommunications infrastructure from coast-to-coast. The group penetrated the systems of AT&T, British Telecom., GTE, MCI WorldCom, Sprint, Southwestern Bell and systems owned by state and federal governmental agencies, to include the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer. They broke into credit-reporting databases belonging to Equifax Inc. and TRW Inc. They entered Nexis/Lexis databases and systems of Dun & Bradstreet. They had access to portions of the national power grid, air-traffic-control systems and had hacked their way into a digital cache of unpublished phone numbers at the White House. A federal court granted the FBI permission to use the first ever “data tap” to monitor the hacker’s activities. These hackers organized their assaults on the computers through teleconferencing and utilized the encryption program PGP to hide the data which they traded with each other. On Sep. 16 1999 Corey Lindsly, age 32, of Portland, Oregon, was sentenced to forty-one months imprisonment and ordered to pay $10,000 to the victim corporations. Other ‘Phonemasters’ members: John Bosanac (’Gatsby’) from San Diego, Calvin Cantrell (’Zibby’) and Brian Jaynes both located in Dallas, Rudy Lombardi (’Bro’) in Canada, Thomas Gurtler in Ohio. Calvin Cantrell, age 30, of Grand Prairie, Texas, was sentenced to two years imprisonment and ordered to pay $10,000 to the victim corporations. John Bosanac got 18 months.

[1995 Feb 15] Kevin Mitnick arrested and charged with obtaining unauthorized access to computers belonging to numerous computer software and computer operating systems manufacturers, cellular telephone manufacturers, Internet Service Providers, and educational institutions; and stealing, copying, and misappropriating proprietary computer software from Motorola, Fujitsu, Nokia, Sun, Novell, and NEC. Mitnick was also in possession of 20,000 credit card numbers.

[1995 Mar 18] SATAN (Security Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks) security tool released to the Internet by Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema. The release stirs huge debate about security auditing tools being given to the public.

[1995 May 5] Chris Lamprecht (’Minor Threat’) becomes 1st person banned from Internet. Chris was sentenced for a number of crimes to which he pled guilty. The crimes involved the theft and sale of Southwestern Bell circuit boards. In the early 1990s Chris wrote a program called ToneLoc (Tone Locator), a phone dialing program modeled on the program Matthew Broderick used in the movie WarGames to find open modem lines in telephone exchanges.

[1995 Aug 16] French student Damien Doligez cracks 40-bit RC4 encryption. The challenge presented the encrypted data of a Netscape session, using the default exportable mode, 40-bit RC4 encryption. Doligez broke the code in eight days using 112 workstations.

[1995 Sep 11] 22-year-old Golle Cushing (’Alpha Bits’) arrested for selling credit card and cell phone info.

[1995 Sep 17] Ian Goldberg and David Wagner broke the pseudo-random number generator of Netscape Navigator 1.1. They get the session key in a few hours on a single workstation.

[1995 Nov 15] On November 15, Christopher Pile becomes the first person to be jailed for writing and distributing a computer virus. Pile, who called himself the ‘Black Baron’, was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

[1996] The internet now has over 16 million hosts and is growing rapidly.

[1996] Icanet, a company that designed Internet sites for public schools, was threatened by an extortionist in Germany. The deal: If Icanet agreed to buy his computer security program for $30,000, the hacker would not devastate the company’s computers. In April, Andy Hendrata, a 27-year-old Indonesian computer science student in Germany, was convicted of computer sabotage and attempted extortion. He received a one-year suspended sentence and was fined $1,500.

[1996] The U.S. General Accounting Office reports that hackers attempted to break into Defense Department computer files some 250,000 times in 1995 alone. About 65 percent of the attempts were successful, according to the report.

[1996 Mar 6] United Press International (UPI) reveals that a hacker called ‘u4ea’ and also known as ‘el8ite’, ‘eliteone’, ‘el8′ and ‘b1ff’ on-line has been threatening to crash systems at the Boston Herald newspaper and several Internet Service providers in the Boston, Massachusetts area. Reports indicate that the hacker may have covertly entered up to 100 Internet sites and desytroyed files on many of them. An investigation is initiated by the NYPD Computer Crimes section.

[1996 Apr 4] According to prosecutors, 19-year-old Christopher Schanot of St. Louis, Missouri, hacked into national computer networks, military computers, and the TRW and Sprint credit reporting service.

[1996 Apr 5] 19-year-old Christopher Schanot (’N00gz’) a St. Louis honor student indicted in Philadelphia for computer fraud, illegal wiretapping, unauthorized access to many corporate and government computers including Southwestern Bell, BELLCORE, Sprint, and SRI.

[1996 Apr 19] Hackers break into the NYPD’s phone system and change the taped message that greeted callers. The new message said, “officers are too busy eating doughnuts and drinking coffee to answer the phones.” It directed callers to dial 119 in an emergency.

[1996 Jul 5] First known Excel virus, called Laroux is found.

[1996 Jul 31] Tim Lloyd plants software time bomb at Omega Engineering in NJ; First federal computer sabotage case. The software time bomb destroyed the company’s computer network and the global manufacturer’s ability to manufacture in the summer of 1996. The attack caused the company $12 million in losses and cost 80 employees their jobs. Lloyd received 41 months in jail. He also was ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution.

[1996 Aug 22] Eric Jenott, a Fort Bragg, NC paratrooper is accused of hacking U.S. Army systems and furnishing passwords to a citizen of communist China. Eric’s attorney says the Fort Bragg soldier is just a computer hacker who tested the strength of a supposedly impenetrable computer system, found a weakness and then told his superiors about it. Eric was later cleared of the spy charges, but found guilty of damaging government property and computer fraud.

[1996 Sep] Johan Helsingius closes penet.fi. Penet.fi, the world’s most popular anonymous remailer, was raided by the Finnish police in 1995 after the Church of Scientology complained that a penet.fi customer was posting the church’s secrets on the Net. Helsingius closed the remailer after a Finnish court ruled he must reveal the customer’s real e-mail address.

[1996 Sep 6] DoS attack against Panix.com, a New York-based ISP. An attacker used a single computer to send thousands of copies of a simple message that computers use to start a two-way dialog. The Panix machines receiving the messages had to allocate so much computer capacity to handle the dialogs that they used up their resources and were disabled.

[1996 Sep 25] Kevin Mitnick indicted for damaging computers at USC. Mitnick was charged with 14 counts of wire fraud, arising from his alleged theft of proprietary software from manufacturers. The charges also accuse him of damaging USC’s computers and “stealing and compiling” numerous electronic files containing passwords.

[1997] AOHell is released, a freeware application that allows a burgeoning community of unskilled hackers — or script kiddies — to wreak havoc on America Online (AOL).

[1997 Jan 28] Ian Goldberg, a University of California-Berkeley graduate student, took on RSA Data Security’s challenge and cracked the 40-bit code by linking together 250 idle workstations that allowed him to test 100 billion possible “keys” per hour. In three and a half hours Goldberg had decoded the message, which read, “This is why you should use a longer key.”

[1997 Feb 5] Members of the Chaos Computer Club, the infamous hacking elite of Germany, demonstrated an ActiveX hacking program that allowed them to access copies of Quicken, the accounting software package from Intuit, and transfer money between bank accounts, without needing to enter the normal password security systems of Quicken.

[1997 Mar 10] Hacker named ‘Jester’ has the first federal charges brought against a juvenile for a computer crime. ‘Jester’ cuts off the FAA tower at Worcester Airport and sentenced to paying restitution to the telephone company and complete 250 hours of community service.

[1997 Apr 21] A hacker named ‘Joka’ managed to trick America Online to briefly shut down a site run by the Texas branch of the Ku Klux Klan, forcing the AOL to act, for security reasons, after it had declined to do so in response to widespread criticism that the site contains offensive material.

[1997 May 23] Carlos Felipe Salgado, Jr., 36, who used the on-line name ‘Smak’, allegedly inserted a sniffer program that gathered the credit information from a dozen companies selling products over the Internet. Carlos gathered 100,000 credit card numbers along with enough information to use them, said the FBI.

[1997 Jun] Netcom (bought by MindSpring, MindSpring then bought by Earthlink) voice-mail hacked by ‘Mr Nobody’. The 15-year-old intruder claimed he has been inside Netcom’s voice-mail for two years. There, he cracked into numerous mailboxes via his telephone key pad and used the system to break into third-party telephone switches to make long-distance calls.

[1997 Oct 31] Eugene Kashpureff arrested for redirecting the NSI web page to his Alternic web site. Kashpureff designed a corruption of the software system that allows Internet-linked computers to communicate with each other. By exploiting a weakness in that software, Kashpureff hijacked Internet users attempting to reach the web site for InterNIC, his chief commercial competitor, to his AlterNIC web site, impeding those users’ ability to register web site domain names or to review InterNIC’s popular “electronic directory” for existing domain names.

[1997 Dec] Julio Ardita (’El Griton’) a 21 year old Argentinean was sentenced to a three-year probation for hacking into computer systems belonging to Harvard, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center.

[1997 Dec 8] www.yahoo.com is defaced by ‘pantz’ and ‘h4gis’.

[1998] Two hackers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen (twin brothers) are sentenced to death by a court in China for breaking into a bank computer network and stealing 720,000 yuan ($87,000). The Yangzhou Intermediate People’s Court in eastern Jiangsu province of China rejected an appeal of Hao Jingwen and upholding a death sentence against him. Jingwen and his brother, Hao Jinglong, hacked into the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China computers and shifted 720,000 yuan ($87,000) into accounts they had set up under phoney names. In September of 1998, they withdrew 260,000 yuan ($31,400) of those funds. Hao Jinglong’s original sentence to death was suspended in return for his testimony.

[1998 Jan 1] Mark Abene (’Phiber Optik’), a security expert, launched a command to check a client’s password files—and ended up broadcasting the instruction to thousands of computers worldwide. Many of the computers obligingly sent him their password files. Abene explained that the command was the result of a misconfigured system, and that he had no intention of generating a flood of password files into his mailbox.

[1998 Jan 16] Tallahassee Freenet hacked. TFN was attacked by a person or persons whose intent was clearly to destroy all of the files on the system. Before the attacks were stopped by bringing the system offline, thousands of user home directories, many system files, and all of the user spool mail had been deleted.

[1998 Feb 25] MIT Plasma & Fusion Center (PSFC) and DoD computers hacked by Ehud Tenebaum (’Analyzer’). The MIT computer was running an old version of Linux, the vulnerability which facilitated intrusion. After gaining access to an account, the hackers took advantage of other security holes and installed a packet-sniffer. The hackers were able to collect user names and passwords to computers outside the network.

[1998 Feb. 26] Solar Sunrise, a series of attacks targeting Pentagon computers, leads to the establishment of round-the-clock, online guard duty at major military computer sites.

[1998 Feb 27] The 56-bit DES-II-1 challenge by RSA Data Security was completed by a massively distributed array of computers coordinating their brute-force attacks via the distributed.net “organization.” The cleartext message read, “Many hands make light work.” The participants collectively examined 6.3 x 10^16 keys—fully 90 percent of the entire keyspace—in about 40 days.

[1998 Mar 3] Santa Rosa Internet Service Provider NetDex rehacked by Ehud Tenebaum (’Analyzer’), in retaliation over the arrest of his two U.S. hacker friends (’Cloverdale Two’).

[1998 Mar 18] Ehud Tenebaum (’The Analyzer’), an Israeli teen-ager is arrested in Israel. During heightened tensions in the Persian Gulf, hackers touch off a string of break-ins to unclassified Pentagon computers and steal software programs. Officials suspect him of working in concert with American teens to break into Pentagon computers. Then-U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre calls it “the most organized and systematic attack” on U.S. military systems to date. An investigation points to two American teens. A 19-year-old Israeli hacker who calls himself ‘The Analyzer’ (Ehud Tenebaum) is eventually identified as their ringleader and arrested. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Tenebaum “damn good … and very dangerous.” The attacks exploited a well-known vulnerability in the Solaris operating system for which a patch had been available for months. Today Tenebaum is chief technology officer of a computer consulting firm.

[1998 Mar 20] Two teenagers hack T-Online, the online service run by Germany’s national telephone company, and steal information about hundreds of bank accounts. The two 16-year-old hackers bragged about their exploits, calling Deutsche Telekom’s security for the online service “absolutely primitive”.

[1998 Apr] Shawn Hillis, 26, of Orlando, Florida, a former employee of NASA contractor Lockheed Martin Corp., pled guilty in Federal district court to using a NASA workstation at the Kennedy Space Center to gain unauthorized access to computer networks of several Orlando businesses.

[1998 Apr 20] An Alabama juvenile hacker launches an e-mail bomb attack consisting of 14,000 e-mail messages across a NASA network against another person using network systems in a commercial domain. The youth was later ordered to probationary conditions for 12 months.

[1998 Apr 22] The MoD criminal hacker group (Masters of Downloading, not to be confused with the 1980’s group Masters of Deception) claimed to have broken into a number of military networks, including the DISN (Defense Information Systems Network); and the DEM (DISN Equipment Manager), which controls the military’s global positioning satellites (GPSs).

[1998 May] Members from the Boston hacker group, L0pht (now @stake), testify before the U.S. Senate about Internet vulnerabilities.

[1998 May 30] A criminal hacker used the sheer size of AOL’s technical support (6,000 people) to social engineer his way into the ACLU’s web site. The attacker repeatedly phoned AOL until he found a support technician foolish enough to grant access to the targeted web site, which was wiped out as a result of the attack.

[1998 Jun 30] Former Coast Guard employee, Shakunla DeviSingla, entered a personnel database she had helped design. DeviSingla used her experience and a former co-worker’s password and other identification to delete data. Her action required 115 employees and 1800 hours to recover the deleted information

[1998 Jul 31] During Def Con 6 The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) release Back Orifice (BO), a tool for analyzing and compromising Windows security.

[1998 Sep 13] Hackers deface The New York Times (www.nytimes.com) web site, renaming it HFG (Hacking for Girls). The hackers express anger at the arrest and imprisonment of Kevin Mitnick, the subject of the book ‘Takedown‘ co-authored by Times reporter John Markoff. In early November, two members of HFG told Forbes magazine that they initiated the attack because they were bored and couldn’t agree on a video to watch.

[1998 Sep 17] Aaron Blosser a contract programmer and self-described “math geek” harnessed over 2,500 U S West computers by installing a program that would utilize their idle time to find very large prime numbers. Their combined computational power in theory surpassed that of most supercomputers. Blosser enlisted 2,585 computers to work at various times during the day and night and quickly ran up 10.63 years of computer processing time in his search for a new prime number. “I’ve worked on this (math) problem for a long time,” said Blosser. “When I started working at U S West, all that computational power was just too tempting for me.”

[1998 Oct 1] Hackers calling themselves the Electronic Disruption Theater allege the Pentagon used illegal offensive information warfare techniques (DDoS attack)– a charge DoD officials deny– to thwart the group’s recent computer attack.

[1998 Nov] The ‘Cloverdale Two’ sentenced to 3 years probation, the two Cloverdale, California teens (’Makaveli’ and ‘Too Short’) hacked dozens of computer systems, including ones run by the Pentagon. It was later discovered that the infamous Israeli hacker, Ehud Tenebaum (’Analyzer’) was the mastermind and mentor to the teens.

[1999 Feb 1] Canadian teen charged in Smurf attack of Sympatico ISP. Smurf attacks are when a malicious Internet user fools hundreds or thousands of systems into sending traffic to one location, flooding the location with pings. The attack was eventually traced to the teen’s home.

[1999 Feb 15] 15-year-old from Vienna hacks into Clemson University’s system and tries breaking into NASA.

[1999 Mar 18] Jay Satiro, an 18-year-old high school dropout was charged with computer tampering after hacking into the internal computers of America Online and altering some programs. Jay pled guilty and was sentenced to one year in jail and five years without a home PC.

[1999 Mar 26] Melissa virus affects 100,000 email users and caused $80 million in damages; written by David Smith a 29-year-old New Jersey computer programmer. The virus known as Melissa, was named after a Florida stripper.

[1999 Apr] Ikenna Iffih, age 28, of Boston, Massachusetts, was charged with using his home computer to illegally gain access to a number of computers, including those controlled by NASA and an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, where, among other things, he allegedly intercepted login names and passwords, and intentionally caused delays and damage in communications. On November 17, 2000, he was sentenced to 6 months home detention, placed on supervised release for 48 months, and ordered to pay $5,000 in restitution.

[1999 Apr 26] CIH virus released by Chen Ing-Hou, the creator of the CIH virus, that takes his initials. This was the first known virus to target the flash BIOS.

[1999 May] The Napster peer-to-peer MP3 file-sharing system, used mainly to copy and swap unencrypted files of songs for free, begins to gain popularity, primarily on college campuses where students have easy access to high-speed Internet connections. It was created by Northeastern University students Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, age 19 and 20, respectively. Before being shut down on July 2, 2001, Napster, had attracted 85 million registered users downloading as many as 3 billion songs a month.

[1999 May 11] Whitehouse.gov defaced by Global Hell.

[1999 Jul 10] Back Orifice 2000 released at Def Con 7.

[1999 Aug 30] Microsoft Corporation shuts down its Hotmail operation for approximately two hours. The shut down comes after receiving confirmed reports that hackers breached some of their servers by entering Hotmail accounts through third-party Internet providers without using passwords.

[1999 Aug 19] ABC news web site defaced by United Loan Gunmen.

[1999 Sep 5] C-Span web site defaced by United Loan Gunmen.

[1999 Sep 13] Drudge Report web site defaced by United Loan Gunmen

[1999 Sep 23] Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange web sites defaced by United Loan Gunmen.