The Decade's 10 Most Dastardly Cybercrimes

By Kevin Poulsen
Threat Level
Wired.com
December 31, 2009

It was the decade of the mega-heist, when stolen credit card magstripe tracks became the pork bellies of a new underground marketplace, Eastern European hackers turned malware writing into an art, and a nasty new crop of purpose-driven computer worms struck dread in the heart of America.

Now that the zero days are behind us, it's time to reflect on the most ingenious, destructive or groundbreaking cybercrimes of the first 10 years of the new millennium.


2000 - MafiaBoy

Once upon a time, "distributed denial of service attacks" were just a way for quarreling hackers to knock each other out of IRC. Then one day in February 2000, a 15-year-old Canadian named Michael "MafiaBoy" Calce experimentally programmed his botnet to hose down the highest traffic websites he could find. CNN, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Dell and eTrade all buckled under the deluge, leading to national headlines and an emergency meeting of security experts at the White House.

Compared to modern DDoS attacks, MafiaBoy's was trivial. But his was the cyberstrike that put the internet's security issues on a national stage, and inaugurated an era where any pissed off script kiddy could take down part of the web at will.


2002 - California Payroll Database Breach

On April 5, 2002, an unidentified hacker penetrated a California server housing the state government's payroll database, gaining access to names, Social Security numbers and salary information for 265,000 state workers from the governor on down. The breach itself was small potatoes, but when it emerged that the California Controller's Office had waited two weeks to warn the victims, angry lawmakers reacted by passing the nation's first breach disclosure law, SB1386.

The law requires hacked organizations to promptly warn potential identity theft victims. Its passage pulled the rock off the string of major corporate breaches that companies would have preferred to hush up.
Today, 45 states have enacted similar laws.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/ye_cybercrimes/