Drama

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• Crew Rivalries The showcase: LOD vs MOD, the antisecurity war, ZF0 owning the whitehats on Black Hat eve, the snitch arc, the prank crews. The full case-file index of the drama wing.
• The Chronicle Forty years of the scene as one timeline — blue boxes (1971) to the DEF CON Epstein bans (2026). The exploits change; the grievance doesn't.

The crew wars & the antisecurity movement

The underground at war with rival crews — and with the industry that monetized it

• LOD vs MOD The "Great Hacker War" — a banishment, a federal wiretap case, and the twist its own veterans insist on: the war was "a complete fabrication."
• The Antisecurity Movement ADM → ~el8 / h0no / PHC "pr0jekt MAYHeM" → anti-sec → LulzSec. "Own the whitehats"; sellout = Fed enabler. The ideological spine.
• GOBBLES Security The anti-full-disclosure comedy act that trolled Bugtraq and ISS for laughs.
• Phalcon/Skism vs NuKE The virus-zine elitism war in 40Hex — the "everyone else is lame" purity panic, a decade before "script kiddie."
• Phone Losers of America The prank-call crew you did not want to cross — pizza-bombing, fake classifieds, the works.
• The Disclosure Wars Ciscogate, MBTA, Sklyarov: when corporate lawyers, not researchers, try to decide what a flaw may be spoken about.

The snitch saga

The scene's cardinal sin, on the record

• LulzSec The 50-day 2011 spree "for the lulz" and Operation AntiSec — brought down from the inside when its own leader turned.
• Sabu / Hector Monsegur The LulzSec leader who became an FBI informant and helped build cases against his own crew. "I didn't point my fingers at nobody" — you decide.
• Jeremy Hammond The AntiSec hacker behind the Stratfor breach, caught with the informant Sabu's help, sentenced to 10 years.

The booter wars & the war on the reporter

DDoS-for-hire goes industrial — and the scene turns on the man covering it

• vDOS The biggest attack-for-hire booter on the planet — 150,000+ attacks, $618k booked — run by two Israeli teenagers, until it got hacked and its own customer database put their names on the front page.
• Paras Jha / Mirai Named a botnet after an anime, pointed it at Minecraft rivals, and accidentally built the record IoT flood that knocked out Krebs and then half the internet's DNS. Pleaded guilty; now works in security.
• Mir Islam / Josh the God The UGNazi teenager who doxed the First Lady and the FBI director on exposed.su, then swatted at least nineteen people — the reporter covering him included. You decide.
• Fly / Sergei Vovnenko The fraud-forum admin who crowdfunded a plot to mail heroin to Brian Krebs's house and have police called on him — then, after prison, apologized. The plot and the mea culpa, both on the record.
• BriansClub The card shop that used Krebs's own name and face as its logo — then got hacked itself and its 26M-card database dumped to him. "No. I'm the real Brian Krebs here." The troll, trolled.
• Rescator / Mikhail Shefel The name inside the Target-breach malware; chased by Krebs for a decade, finally unmasked — then sat down for an interview and pitched him a business deal.
• HieuPC / Hieu Minh Ngo The identity-data kingpin who caused "more harm to more Americans than any other convicted cybercriminal," got stung in Guam, did seven years, and came out a whitehat. "What I was doing was just evil."
• The Manipulaters / Saim Raza The Pakistani phishing crew Krebs unmasked for a decade off their own opsec fails — who kept emailing him to beg for takedowns. "Why you destroy our lifes? We never harm anyone." Raided in 2025.

The SIM-swap kids & the clout grab

Teenagers, stolen phone numbers, and the OG-handle status economy

• Joel Ortiz A college valedictorian, the first person convicted of SIM-swapping — $5M+ in stolen crypto, flexing on OGusers, reportedly holding the "0" Twitter handle. The origin story of the scene.
• Graham Ivan Clark / "Kirk" The 17-year-old who seized Obama, Musk and Biden's Twitter accounts in July 2020 for a Bitcoin scam, from inside the company's own admin tools. Owned the blue-check heavens for an afternoon.

The grifters & the clowns

When the whole act is the con — or the self-incriminating marketing

• John Bernard / John Clifton Davies A con man who fled a 12-year fraud sentence, played a fake Swiss billionaire investor, and fleeced startups out of ~$30M via "due-diligence fees" paid to a firm he secretly owned. Then did it again under new names.
• Punchmade Dev / Devon Turner The rapper who wore a working diamond card-skimmer as jewelry, dropped "Wire Fraud Tutorial," opened a card shop under his own brand — then sued his bank for freezing the money. Uncharged, still posting.

The legends & the deep cuts

The figures the scene was built on — and buried

• Phiber Optik Blamed by the Secret Service for an AT&T crash it caused itself; the first hacker wiretap case; the "Robin Hood of cyberspace."
• Kevin Poulsen / Dark Dante Rigged a radio contest to win a Porsche, went fugitive, did the era's longest hacker sentence — then co-created SecureDrop.
• Kevin Mitnick The myth the press built and he sold back at $2,500 a keynote — and the 2009 morning ZF0 owned "the World's Most Famous Hacker" on his own box.
• Cult of the Dead Cow Founded in a slaughterhouse; Back Orifice, hacktivism, and alumni from Mudge to a presidential candidate.
• w00w00 The most influential crew you never heard of — alumni seeded Napster and WhatsApp and led security at half the industry.
• The Morris Worm The 1988 worm that crashed the early internet by accident — and became the first felony conviction under the CFAA.
• Karl Koch / the KGB Hack West German hackers who sold US military access to the KGB — traced by "The Cuckoo's Egg." Koch was found burned to death in 1989. The scene's darkest chapter.
• Knight Lightning Prosecuted over a leaked E911 document valued at $79,449 — that BellSouth sold publicly for $13. The founding free-press case.
• Mitnick vs Shimomura The Christmas 1994 spoof into a top researcher's home box, the two-month manhunt with a Times reporter riding along, and the decade-long fight over who exaggerated what. The scene's first true-crime franchise.
• L0DE Radio Hour The live call-in shock-broadcast out of the IRC underground that outlasted the platforms it started on — trolling with a signal instead of a text file, and a documented "you don't fuck with lrh" counter-hack streak.

→ Every drama case file in the Case File Index