Bit about Jonathan James
The search giant Google hired Michal Zalewski, a famous hacker whos well-known for multiple major security holes discovered in the applications. In 2007, the 26-year-old hacker was more focused on the web-browsers, finding several flaws in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. According to ZDNet, in February, Zalewski paid special attention to Mozilla Firefox.
On an almost-daily basis, he published proof-of-concept exploits for zero-day bugs in the open-source and forced Mozilla security engineers to constantly work on creating patches.
The same source sustained that Michal Zalewski confirmed his new job but refused to provide more details about his work at the Googleplex. However, it seems that he will work as an Information Security Engineer, having the role of adding a little bit more security to the Google branded products.
The first underager to go to prison for hacking.
At the age of 16 Janathan James AKA c0mrade was sentenced to 6 months in prison after breaking his parole for a computer related crime. This makes him the first juvenile to be inducted into the bowels of the man for hacking. Jonathan went by the hacker alias c0mrade and was quoted for saying “I was just looking around, playing around. What was fun for me was a challenge to see what I could pull off”.
c0mrade installed backdoor’s into the Defense Threat Reduction Agency server. This backdoor allowed him to view sensitive data including emails as well as capture usernames and passwords of the the DTRA employees.
c0mrade also hacked into NASA computer systems where he copied software that was reported to be worth in upwarrds of $1.7 million dollars. Alarmed by the intrusion NASA was forced to shut down the system costing them an estimated $41 Gs. The most amusing part about this NASA hack was the reason why. He was downloading source code to further improve his C programming skills. “The code itself was crappy…certainly not worth $1.7 million like they claimed.”
