Famous Hackers

CCC(Chaos Computer Club)

The CCC (Chaos Computer Club) was founded on September 12, 1981 and is one of the biggest hacker groups in the world, with over 4,000 members.

The main interests of the group are: freedom of information, human right to communication and more transparency in government.

The group gained worldwide publicity by stealing 134,000 Deuch Marks from the German Bildschirmtext computer network by manipulating the system to pay the group. The group had already told the system provider of the fault, but due to lack of faith the fault was left unfixed.

The money was returned the next day in front of the press.

In 1989, the group was back in the spotlight due to a cyber-espionage case. One loosely affiliated member (Karl Koch) was arrested for breaking into US corporate and government machines, selling stolen source code to the KGB.

Another old target of the CCC was the French in relation to nuclear tests performed in the 1980's and 1990's.

In 1996, members of the CCC demonstrated a vulnerability in Microsoft's ActiveX technology, manipulating data in a Quicken database from the outside.

In 1998, CCC demonstrated the cloning of a GSM sim card, cracking the COMP128 encryption algorythm.

In 2008, in protest of the German government using biometric data to identify citizens, the CCC published the fingerprints of the German Minister of Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. They distributed them on a piece of film which could be used to fool fingerprint readers.

The CCC hosts an annual conference called "Chaos Communication Congress", which is Europe's biggest hacker conference (up to 4,500 people attend every year).

The CCC also publishes a quarterly magazine called Datenschleuder (german for "data catapult"), and members in Berlin also host a monthly radio talk show called "Chaosradio" on the Fritz radio station.