1995: Citibank’s Vladimir Levin
One of the five greatest hacking attacks and robberies the world has ever seen is listed below. In 1995 the Citibank / Vladimir Levin Case shook all the commercial banks in the industry. Russian software engineer Vladimir Levin managed to hack into Citibank’s New York IT System. He did this in his apartment in St Petersburg. He authorized a series of fraudulent transactions, eventually wiring an estimated of $10 million to accounts worldwide. Fortunately, many of the transactions were tracked by the FBI. Following extradition to the US, Levin was jailed for 3 years in 1998. Most of the stolen cash was recovered.
1999: Melissa Virus
The evil work of an American programmer David L. Smith put the entire world in grave peril. The Melissa Virus was carried in a Word document attached to an email. When the attachment was opened, the virus infected the host system. Automatically it would forward the email to the first 50 people in the victim’s address book. Email providers had to suspend services until a fix was found.
2000: Mafia Boy
No one could possibly forget the 2000 Mafia Boy incident. Mafia Boy was the online handle of a teenage hacker from Quebec, Canada called Michael Calce. In February 2000, Calce launched Project Rivolta. It was a series of massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks against companies including Yahoo!, Fifa.com, Amazon, Dell, eBay and CNN. It overloaded the company’s servers with traffic. Calce managed to freeze operations in several multinational corporations, losing them an estimated $1.2 billion.
2004: Delta Airlines / Sven Jaschan
German college student Sven Jaschan brought down the entire IT system of American airline Delta in 2004. He was also credited for writing the Sasser worm, a self-replicating, self-distributing virus which attacked vulnerable Microsoft Windows operating systems. Estimated to have infected tens of millions of computers worldwide, causing up to $500 million in damage.
2005: Operation Get Rich
Several big name retailers in the US were targeted in 2005. A series of major hacks aimed at stealing customer credit and debit card details. All of these attacks were the work of Alberto Gonzalez and his gang. They used SQL injections to exploit weaknesses in unsecured company Wi-Fi.