Hackers: Code & Chaos | National Media Archive

The Rise and Impact of the Mirai Botnet

What began as a Minecraft server rivalry among three young hackers escalated into the Mirai botnet, the most powerful DDoS tool in history. Infecting hundreds of thousands of unsecured IoT devices worldwide, Mirai launched record-breaking attacks on major companies and internet infrastructure in 2016. Its creators were caught, but the release of Mirai's code sparked a new era of botnet threats, highlighting vast security flaws and reshaping the cybercrime landscape. 
 
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Colonial Pipeline Cyberattack

In May 2021, the Colonial Pipeline, the largest refined oil pipeline in the US, was crippled by a ransomware attack exploiting weak VPN security and leaked credentials. The hack led to fuel shortages, panic buying, and a $4.4M ransom payment. Despite partial ransom recovery by the FBI, the incident exposed major gaps in US critical infrastructure cybersecurity. Two years on, cyber threats to essential systems persist, with little meaningful change in defenses. 
 
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The Gary McKinnon UFO Hack: Inside the Biggest Military Cyber Intrusion

Between 2001 and 2002, British hacker Gary McKinnon accessed 97 US military and NASA computers, searching for evidence of UFOs and secret space programs. His actions caused major disruptions and led to charges of the largest military hack in history, sparking a decade-long extradition battle. Diagnosed with Asperger's, McKinnon avoided extradition due to mental health concerns. 
 
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The Hacker, the FBI, and the Fall of Anonymous

Mustafe Al-Bassam was born in 1995, and was working with anonymous, he and his group Lulzsec an offspring from anonymous hacked many major companies such as the CIA. Exposing customers data from 25 million users.
 
 

The Teenager Who Beat Apple, Sony, and Elon Musk

There’s something thrilling about watching a kid stare down a billion-dollar corporation and win. It’s the kind of story Silicon Valley pretends to celebrate—until it doesn’t.
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Before it became a badge of honor to disrupt, before venture-backed startups turned words like “hacker” into corporate slogans, there was a teenager in New Jersey with a screwdriver, a guitar pick, and an idea. His name was George Hotz, and when the iPhone launched—locked tight in a walled garden called AT&T—he decided that wasn’t good enough. Seventeen years old, full of obsession and caffeine, he cracked it wide open.
It wasn’t just about making a phone work on T-Mobile. It was about telling a machine that it no longer belonged to the company that made it. It belonged to the person who bought it. To do that, George found the chip that told the iPhone who it could talk to—Apple’s baseband processor—and soldered a wire directly onto it, scrambled its memory with voltage, and tricked it into thinking it had been erased. Then he fed it code until it bent to his will. The next morning, he walked into his parents’ kitchen and recorded a grainy video on a flip cam. “Hey everyone, I’m GeoHot,” he said, holding up the world’s first unlocked iPhone. That video exploded—millions of views, press coverage, and a myth was born.
The move wasn’t just technical. It was political. The act of jailbreaking showed users they could own the devices they paid for. It threatened the business model of giants like Apple, who sold phones cheap but locked them into monthly contracts. It cracked open a conversation about what ownership meant in a digital age. For George, this was just the beginning.
From a young age, George was the kind of kid who broke things to learn how they worked. Radios, TV remotes, anything with a circuit board. His father, a school computer teacher, shrugged it off. If this was how he learned, so be it. By middle school, George was building his own game consoles. By high school, he was building infrared mapping robots that landed him on science fair stages and even the Today Show. But school bored him. Rules bored him. He wanted to see what else he could do.
What he did next was take on Sony.
At the time, Sony’s PlayStation 3 was considered unhackable. A digital fortress. But to George, that was just another dare. He opened up the console with the same surgical curiosity he’d used on the iPhone. Beneath the plastic was a chip called the hypervisor—the digital bouncer that stopped users from doing anything Sony hadn’t explicitly allowed. Using voltage surges and over 500 lines of custom code, George made that chip blink a zero on screen. Zero meant root access. He now owned the PS3 in a way Sony never intended.
Sony freaked out.
They sued. Hard. Under laws meant to stop fraud, they said George had broken in where he didn’t belong, even though the device was his. But the lawsuit didn’t just rile up one teenager. It woke up the entire internet. Hacker groups, digital rights organizations, and legions of fans rallied behind him. Anonymous declared war on Sony. The story became bigger than George. It became a referendum on power.
All the while, George never claimed to be a saint. He just wanted to understand how things worked. That impulse—to dig into locked systems, to own the tools we use—drove him deeper into the world of machines, and eventually, into the heart of Silicon Valley.
But it also made him dangerous. To some, he was a hero. To others, a threat. And that tension—between curiosity and control, code and consequence—follows him to this day.
 

Teen Hackers vs Microsoft, Epic, and the FBI

David Pokora wasn’t the kind of kid who had to try very hard to get into trouble. By the age of three, he wasn’t reading stories — he was playing first-person shooters with more grace than most adults could manage with a controller. He wasn't interested in the aliens or the explosions. What grabbed him was the feeling. Press a key, make something happen. Left-click, and pixels obey. It was a language. One he understood fluently before anyone realized it was dangerous to know that kind of thing. When his family traveled to Poland, he didn’t bring books or toys. He brought a laptop, a brick of a machine he’d use to teach himself programming from scratch. No Wi-Fi. No Google. Just trial, error, and the kind of masochistic joy only a true hacker understands: breaking something a thousand times just to learn how to fix it once.
 

The Surfer Who Saved the Internet

By age fourteen, he'd joined a basic hacking forum centered around chaos on MSN Messenger, the once-ubiquitous instant messaging service.
 
There, kids swapped code like other kids traded Pokémon cards.
 
Worms disguised as images.
 
Keyloggers wrapped in innocent-looking apps.
 
At first, Marcus didn’t understand what half of it did.
 
But he was curious.
 
Curious enough to write his own password stealer — code that could extract login credentials from Internet Explorer’s autofill feature, decrypting them and saving them for future mischief.
 
He shared it with the forum.
 
They were impressed.
 
He felt seen -- and this was only the beginning.
 
This is the story of Marcus Hutchins.

The Coming Age of AI Hackers

AI-driven hacking is rapidly approaching, with systems able to exploit vulnerabilities faster and in ways humans may not anticipate. As demonstrated in competitions like the Cyber Grand Challenge, AI can already find creative solutions outside human logic. Experts warn that soon, fully automated AI hackers could threaten financial, political, and social systems, requiring new, agile defenses. Ironically, AI may also be key to safeguarding against these emerging threats. 
 
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Russian Businessman Convicted in $90M Insider Trading Hack

Vladislav Klyushin, a wealthy Russian IT company owner, was convicted of wire fraud, unauthorized computer access, and securities fraud for leading a scheme that hacked U.S. computer networks to steal insider information from companies like Microsoft and Tesla. The group used the data to make nearly $90 million in illicit stock trades. 
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Red Golf: Prolific Chinese Hacking Group Exposed

Red Golf, a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group closely linked to APT-41, has been highly active globally, targeting various industries like aviation, government, IT, and media. Security researchers identified infrastructure and malware, including the KeyPlug backdoor, used in cyber-espionage campaigns. While China denies involvement, evidence suggests Red Golf rapidly exploits new vulnerabilities and remains a persistent global cyber threat. 
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