Spammer Eddie Davidson (now on the run from prison) is just the latest in a history of IT identities in trouble with the law. Here are five of the most publicised IT criminals.
Notorious spammer Eddie Davidson caused stir over the weekend when he reportedly escaped from a minimum security prison in Louisiana. Presuming he's not caught, Davidson could in theory go back to pumping out penny stock scam emails, a venture that made him around US$1.2 million a year between 2003 and 2006.
IT crime is nothing new, however, and while Davidson stands out for simply escaping there's a pecking order to the IT criminal underworld. Here are five of the most notorious cases where IT identities have fallen foul of the law.
#1 Kevin Mitnick
Crime: Hacking
Mitnick's probably the IT world's most famous IT criminal, although the methods he used to gain access to systems belonging to DEC, NEC, Sun, Motorola and Nokia, amongst others, were much more to do with socially engineering access rather than outright number-crunching hacking. Mitnick spent five years in prison (including eight months in solitary confinement) and now runs a security consultancy business.
#2 Hans Reiser
Crime: Second Degree Murder
How do you go from lead designer on a Linux file system and darling of the Open Source world to the number #2 spot on our list? Murder will do it -- following the 2006 disappearance of Hans Reiser's estranged Russian mail-order bride, and after an increasingly bizarre trial (in which Reiser came this close to actually attempting to use the Chewbacca Defence), few in the Open Source were quite so pro-Reiser as before.
#3: Robert Soloway
Crime: Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam and Spam. With added Spam.
Eddie Davidson's in the news now for escaping, but he's got a way to go to dethrone the "Spam King", Robert Soloway. Soloway (or companies acting on his behalf) was responsible for billions of spam email messages -- so many, in fact, that even Microsoft was able to get a summary judgement worth US$7.8 million against him for hijacking Hotmail addresses.
#4 Hew Griffiths
Crime: Copyright Infringement
Griffiths headed up the Drink Or Die group, which cracked and distributed software owned by US companies. Griffiths fought extradition from Australian soil, but all it took was one signed extradition order, and Griffiths found himself cooling his heels in Virginia, despite not financially benefiting from his crimes, or, for that matter, physically setting foot in the USA at any time previous.
#5 Robert Morris
Crime: Writing computer worm
Morris catapulted to world attention in 1988, when a computer worm he allegedly wrote disrupted something the New York Times referred to as a "nationwide computer network" (Morris was put on probation in 1990). Morris was reportedly fined US$10,000, and many people were left wondering what this "network" was all about.