Possibly more famous for its ponies than its hackers, Shetland Islanders with their Aran jumpers and fishing tendencies wouldn’t strike you as computer masterminds by nature. However, Topiary, a 19 year old male, who is said to have caused the Anonymous and Lulusez hacks, was apprehended on the island because of the high profile attacks.
The attacks which were in response to PayPal’s suspension of all donations to Wikileaks have seen hundreds close their PayPal accounts after the arrest. So, with such a voracious pro-hacking sentiment rife on the net, we look at the top five hacks of all time.
MIT’s VU Meter
This is one of the more humorous hacks and one that stays relatively on the good side of hacking. The students of MIT in a quite old school but still very respectable attempt, managed to turn the top of a student dorm building into a giant VU meter which measured lights, sound and volume. Not good enough for the students, they also linked it to Boston a concert, meaning the meter was a live VU for whatever gig was going on in the city that night. One of the first buildings light up by hack and probably one of the best.
Internet Radio
We’ve all scrambled for the phone after hearing there is a prize for the 76th caller on radio. Well spare a thought for Kevin Poulson, who on hearing the station was giving a free Porsche to the 102nd caller decided to hack the stations phone system and ensure he was caller number 102 and therefore Porsche winner. He was arrested 12 months later and sentenced to three years in prison.
Obama’s Dead
A fine example of hove hacks can be used for more malevolent purposes and an example of a suspected LuluSez job which turned out to be by another hacking favourite called ScriptKidz. The hack which caused the hacker’s favourite target Fox New’s Social Media Twitter feed to declare President Obama to have been assassinated caused huge controversy. Even after the official hack was removed, it turned out that there were more stray hacks littering the site which Fox had not latched onto. 
Iranian Army
To randomly stick on twitter and be confronted by the Iranian Cyber Army Front Page must be a bit of a shock. Amazingly this happened to thousands of people who logged on one morning in 2009 to find the Shiite hackers had rerouted the site after city wide discontent in Tehran caused by Twittering about the government’s media crackdown.
MafiaBoy
This now infamous gentleman hacked into and took down eBay, Amazon and Yahoo in 2000- quite an achievement to take of three of the biggest sites at the time. MafiaBoy could have done far more damage than he did, though just stuck a load of junk on the sites to confuse people. This hack managed to take control of 75 different computers on 52 different networks which managed to infiltrate and send 10,700 fake information requests in 10 seconds.
We hope you enjoyed our top 5 hacks. Can anyone else remember any other notable or embarrassing ones? Please let us know via the comment section.
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