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Home Trivia Trivia: Who Was The First Hacker To Make The FBI’s Most Wanted...

Trivia: Who Was The First Hacker To Make The FBI’s Most Wanted List?

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August 14, 2025

TRIVIA

Who Was The First Hacker To Make The FBI's Most Wanted List?

Kevin Mitnick can make a very strong argument that he deserves the title of the most famous hacker in computer history. Back in 1995, he received the dubious honor of becoming the first hacker to make the FBI's Most Wanted List. He started hacking in 1979, at the age of 16. As well as being technically adept, Mitnick was a gifted exponent of social engineering. He would ring victims and pose as a representative of all manner of technical or official organizations, or as a stressed colleague or a worried customer. He had sufficient knowledge and confidence to be able to call up system engineers and other administrative personnel and trick them into handing over passwords and other actionable intelligence. Eventually, he was forced to go on the run. He was captured two and a half years later and served a five-year prison term. In a classic poacher-turned-gamekeeper move, he now runs his Mitnick Security Consulting LLC, a cybersecurity company. Robert Morris wrote the infamous Morris Worm that brought a large part of the internet to its knees in 1988. He says he didn't write it to be malicious. A bug in its replication algorithm was to blame for the network stress that saw approximately 10% of the internet struggle to cope with the traffic generated by the worm. Although it brought Morris the first felony conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, he later became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kevin Poulsen wanted to win the big prize in a contest held by KIIS-FM radio. It was a Porsche 944 S2 and it was going to go to the 102nd caller to the station. He had a history of hacking into phone systems so it was trivial for Poulsen to commandeer all the telephone lines to the station to ensure he'd be the 102nd caller and get the prize. Sadly for him, the FBI took an interest. So, just like Mitnick, he had to go on the run. And just like Mitnick, he was sentenced to five years. On the back of his notoriety, Poulsen later became a technology journalist. Tsutomu Shimomura isn't a black-hat hacker at all. He is the cybersecurity expert that helped the FBI to eventually catch Kevin Mitnick. Not all hackers are bad!

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Dave McKay has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry. He has been a freelance programmer, the manager of an international software development team, an IT services project manager, and a Data Protection Officer. He is now a technology journalist and independent Data Protection and Compliance consultant.

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