The 5 Most Famous Hacks of All-Time

We’re always keeping our eyes out for the next big hack. Whether a hacker wants to steal credit information or keep operating systems under lockdown until victims pay a fee — this is called ransomware — it seems like there’s always a new hack of which we should be wary.

But most of the time, those hacks don’t do extreme damage or are remedied fast enough that most people forget all about them. Not so with these five hacks that will remain forever in our memories.  

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Spamhaus DDOS

Spamhaus is an anti-spam service that blocks unwanted emails to accounts all over the world. An Internet provider based in Amsterdam called Cyberbunker found its emails blocked by Spamhaus, and they retaliated with a denial of service attacks — a huge one. The attacker — later arrested — caused Internet connections all over Europe to slow down massively.

Sony Pictures Hack

Hackers in North Korea really didn’t want to see the comedy The Interview released. The movie’s plot was focused on killing their leader, Kim Jong-Un, and to prevent its screeners, these hackers downed Sony Pictures’ computers and repeatedly froze emails.

NASA and Department of Defense Hack

This attack at the beginning of the 2000s is memorable because of how massive it was. 15-year-old Jonathan James and 35-year-old Scot Gary McKinnon hacked into NASA in 1999 by hacking computers at the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Later, they hacked into the source code for the International Space Station’s life support systems — a hack that cost $41,000 to repair. But the real reason people remember the hack is because of the teenaged

James’ prison sentence and subsequent suicide.

Mt. Gox Hack

Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world circa 2014, lost millions of dollars because of a sophisticated bug that locked users out of their accounts. In all, hackers stole $460 million worth of Bitcoin money over three to four years.

Stuxnet

A Microsoft Windows worm that infected Siemens industrial controllers, this malware — discovered in 2010 — targeted uranium enrichment facilities in Iran and stopped operations in nuclear power plants by making centrifuges operate abnormally.

Are there other hacks you remember that we haven’t included on this list? Describe what you think were the worst hacks of all time in the comments.