From the US elections to our very own Brexit vote, allegations of interference from hackers have been flying faster than spy drones.
Since nearly all of our political, professional and personal information is now stored online, it’s not surprising data has become such a popular target – and a very lucrative one for those who know how to break encryption and gain access.
That’s also why ethical hacking – whereby law-abiding cyber specialists test systems – is such an important part of maintaining security.
But not all hackers who changed the world have been regarded as heroes!
Alan Turing
Made famous to a new generation thanks to the movie The Imitation Game,
Turing was a hacker before computers even existed.
How so? He came up with the genius idea of creating The Turing Machine, a device that cracked the Nazi encryption system known as Enigma, saving more British lives in World War II than any single person.
He continued to be hugely influential in the development of theoretical computer science.
He should have been hailed a hero and lived as one of the world’s greatest minds in computing…but due to persecution of his sexuality, his story would end in tragedy.
Aaron Swartz
Our second hacker has also been immortalised in film. The Internet’s Own Boy tells the true tale of whizz-kid American Aaron.
While only in his teens he was a co-designer of RSS and Reddit. He also wrote code for Creative Commons, using copyright law to offer control over how our digital creations can be used.
But his passion for delving into the cyber world would lead him to create a method for downloading massive numbers of academic articles from a paywalled library using a computer hidden in a closet at MIT.
Arrested in 2011, he was indicted on charges carrying a potential jail term of 35 years. His story too would end in tragedy… but for many he remains a hero of civic awareness and social activism.
Julian Assange
No article about hacking can possibly ignore the existence of this man. And, guess what? Yes, he has a movie too: The Fifth Estate.
Assange started hacking aged 16, using the codename Mendax, then in 2006 he created WikiLeaks, a platform for publishing news leaks and classified documents from anonymous sources.
And that’s where his troubles began. In 2010 the US government launched an investigation against him, leading him to spend many years in self-imposed house arrest at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. As we write, he is currently being held in a British jail…his story is to be continued.
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