The Unknowns
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The Unknowns is a self-proclaimed
Members
The team had 6 not 7 core members:[4]
- Pixiedust, founder, spokesperson, and leader,
- Mr. P-Teo, programmer
- Fabien Léac,a French researcher in computer faults and a white hacker
- MrSecurity, a black-hat hacker, programmer and ghostwriter of The Unknowns
- NeTRoX, a black-hat hacker, penetration tester and researcher. Joined to the team in late 2015 after the team reunited.
Jail
Zyklon B, who lives in France, was arrested by the French Intelligence Service on June 24, 2012. He was later released because he was just sixteen years old at the time. He has trials taking place in 2014 supposedly.[5] His life is related in a book written by his mother Sophie Léac L'histoire vraie d'un jeune hacker français (in October 2013) or the true story of a French teen-hacker. A second book is in preparation: Hack! There will be cyberwar!.[6]
Hacked websites and applications
The group has hacked many websites and applications using a series of different attacks. The most notable, however, being SQL injection.[7] There have been a lot of companies affected by the group, but some of the hacks even for big companies did not make the media (probably due to keeping the multi-country legal investigation a secret). However, the most notable hacks done by The Unknowns, mostly government related websites, did make mass media.[8] The group is still active, and the members are still working together, as they try to make the internet safer.
- Asian College of Technology
- Bahrain Defense Force
- California State University
- Christian Mingle
- Deutsche Federal Government
- European Space Agency
- ESET
- French Ministry of Defense
- Harvard University
- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- United States Navy
- NASA
- New7Wonders
- Renault
- Royal Thai Navy
- Sempra Energy
- Social Democratic Party of Germany
- United Kingdom Ministry of Defense
- University of Rhode Island
- United States Military
- United States Air Force
- United States Department of Commerce
- United States Department of the Treasury
- PayPal, no information was released. The Unknown contacted PayPal with the exploits he/she found and received $1,000 as a reward.
However they have used different attacks:
- Two United Kingdom police servers were exploited and root access was gained to the systems. Not much is known about this attack.[9]
Abolished
The purpose of The Unknowns was to find security issues in high-profiled websites and to get them patched.[citation needed] The information from the hacked sites was released because The Unknowns attempted to make contact with all their targets informing them of the security issues, but they did not receive a response back from any of the websites targeted. Some data was leaked to force these websites to patch their systems.
After a period of hacking high-profile websites, The Unknown disbanded the group in 2012 but reunited it in the early 2015.[citation needed]
References
List of hacked websites/companies
- ^ "NASA, ESA confirm they were hacked by 'The Unknowns'". NBC News. Retrieved May 7, 2012.
- ^ "The Unknowns Pastebin post". Retrieved May 7, 2012.
- ZDNet. Retrieved May 7, 2012.
- ^ "An article about the group". Retrieved January 18, 2014.
- ^ "Zyklon B claiming to have been arrested". Retrieved January 10, 2014.
- ^ https://wordpress.com/page/sophielac.wordpress.com/2
- ^ a b "A news article talking about the use of SQL injection attacks". May 4, 2012. Retrieved January 10, 2014.
- ^ "A news article about the group by ABC". ABC News. Retrieved January 10, 2014.
- ^ "A news article talking about UK police servers getting hacked by The Unknowns". Retrieved January 10, 2014.