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Hacks & Heists

Worms, bank heists, social-engineering capers and hacktivism — the hacks that became legend across the internet.

  1. № 01

    Mirai Botnet: The IoT Army That Broke the Internet

    The Mirai botnet hijacked hundreds of thousands of default-password IoT devices and, in 2016, knocked Twitter, Reddit, and Spotify offline via DNS provider Dyn.

  2. № 02

    Bangladesh Bank Heist: The Typo That Saved a Billion

    The Bangladesh Bank heist saw Lazarus-linked hackers steal $81 million over SWIFT in 2016, foiled from a full billion only by a single misspelled word.

  3. № 03

    Lapsus$: The Teenagers Who Broke Big Tech

    Lapsus$ was a Telegram group of teenagers who breached Nvidia, Samsung, Microsoft, Okta, and Uber using MFA fatigue, SIM swaps, and bribed insiders.

  4. № 04

    Twitter Bitcoin Hack: A Teen Who Phoned the Help Desk

    The 2020 Twitter Bitcoin hack hijacked verified accounts of Obama, Musk, and Apple after a Florida teen social-engineered Twitter's internal support tools.

  5. № 05

    Heartbleed: The OpenSSL Typo That Bled the Web

    Heartbleed was a tiny OpenSSL flaw that let anyone read 64KB of server memory at a time, leaking passwords and private keys across two-thirds of the web.

  6. № 06

    CrowdStrike Outage: The Update That Crashed the World

    The CrowdStrike outage of July 2024 saw one bad Falcon update blue-screen 8.5 million Windows machines, grounding flights and freezing hospitals worldwide.

  7. № 07

    Maroochy Shire: The Insider Who Spilled the Sewers

    A rejected job applicant kept his contractor's radio and laptop, drove around an Australian sewage network for months, and remote-released a million liters into the parks and rivers.

  8. № 08

    Twilio 2022: One Phished SMS, 130 Companies Exposed

    Twilio's 2022 breach began with phishing SMS to employees and cascaded into 130 downstream firms, including Signal and the Authy two-factor app itself.

  9. № 09

    Levandowski vs. Waymo: 14,000 Stolen Files

    Anthony Levandowski took 14,000 files from Google's self-driving program, sold his startup to Uber, and pled guilty to trade-secret theft against Waymo.

  10. № 10

    Log4Shell: The Log Line That Broke the Internet

    A logging library used by half the internet would execute any code you wrote into a chat message. The fix took the world a weekend; the cleanup took years.

  11. № 11

    Spectre and Meltdown: The Flaws Baked Into Silicon

    Spectre and Meltdown were CPU flaws in speculative execution that let any program read protected memory, affecting nearly every processor of the prior two decades.

  12. № 12

    The Morris Worm: The Internet's First Disaster

    In 1988 a graduate student released a self-replicating program to measure the internet. A bug in its restraint logic instead became the internet's first disaster.

  13. № 13

    Conficker: The Botnet That Was Never Fired

    From 2008 the Conficker worm built a botnet of millions of PCs and spurred an industry coalition to fight it, yet its operators never weaponized it.

  14. № 14

    SQL Slammer: The Worm That Saturated the Internet

    Code Red in 2001 and SQL Slammer in 2003 proved a single UDP packet worm could saturate the global internet in under fifteen minutes.

  15. № 15

    Kevin Mitnick: The Hacker the Myth Outran

    Kevin Mitnick, America's most-wanted hacker, was caught in 1995 by rival Tsutomu Shimomura and became the face of social engineering as the real attack surface.

  16. № 16

    MafiaBoy: The Teenager Who Took the Web Offline

    A fifteen-year-old in Montreal knocked Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, CNN, and Dell offline over a single week in February 2000 — and bragged about it in a chat room.