7 Of Most Legendary Hacker Attacks Ever Carried Out In The World

Never pick a fight with a coder, you'll never know when you'll find yourself face down in a gutter. In a very hypothetical sense, we hope. These guys will tell you why.

1. Thunderstruck

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If you were to hack into the control system of several nuclear research facilities in Iran, what's the craziest thing you'd do before drawing the line? How about taking a page out of this genius' book? Reported first in 2012, not only did the hacker shut down the monitors and mess up the hardware at will, but at random times in the wee hours of the night the hacker would also activate the workstations just to play "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC at full volume to make Iran rock out like a boss.

2. Cupcakes for Al-Qaeda

funnyjunk.com

I love British humour. Especially when it's the MI6. In 2011, MI6 took over a radical Muslim preacher's online website. They replaced a tutorial on how to manufacture pipe bombs in your kitchen and replaced it with a collection of cupcake recipes. I know what you're thinking, the answer is no, they weren't original recipes, they were borrowed from the Ellen DeGeneres show. Sorry sonny, had to reschedule the bombings, here's a carrot cake instead.

3. High School Musical

Geek

Remember Lizard Squad? Quite a nuisance a couple of years back, they were quite the opposite of what Anonymous are. They didn't have a cause, they would just wreak havoc because they could. Having said that, some of their acts were so bizarre that they actually ended up being quite funny. Like in February 2015, Lizard Squad hacked PC manufacturer Lenovo. They took down their website but obviously things didn't end there. They replaced the site with a webcam feed of bored teenagers soundtracked to the tune of "High School Musical". Burn level - 1000.

4. Burger King

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Nothing can do damage to a brand as quickly and as effectively as a social media hack. Burger King learnt about this back in 2013 when their Twitter account got hacked. The hacker clearly just wanted to bug a few people off since he changed their display name to "McDonalds" and replaced the display picture with the one with golden arches. Hilariously, the page remained like that for about an hour before the account was suspended.

5. Britney Spears

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One of the funniest celebrity hacks till date. In 2009, a prankster/hacker took over Britney Spears' twitter account and went full Illuminati on her. The hacker filled her page with pictures of the eye in the pyramid. Even started tweeting random Illuminati nonsense hoping that the New World Order would arrive soon and that saying Britney was apparently "giving herself to Lucifer every day." Glory to Satan.

6. BART

pcworld.com

Okay, this was more like a revenge hack. The ones Anonymous are famous for. People wanted to protest against the shutting down of the subterranean cellular services by the company. The protests failed after the BART security ended up shooting an unarmed passenger. This was reason enough for Anonymous to take the matter into their own hands and boy, did they have some fun. They gained access to MYBART.org and posted all sensitive details like usernames and passwords of the users on the websites but that obviously wasn't enough for these barts. When Linton Johnson, the company's spokesperson refused to accept the company's mistake, Anonymous just posted naked pictures of Johnson online. Classic.

7. Telegraph

Twitter/ iWaste

Perhaps the oldest hack story ever reported was long before the computer actually got invented. Back in 1909, some of London's finest minds got together in the Royal Institution's lecture hall to witness the world's first-ever display of the long-distance wireless telegraph designed by Guglielmo Marconi. But things never go as planned, do they? Nevil Maskelyen, a magician and prankster, who also happened to be Marconi's rival at the time, figured out his method and found a way to work around the machine. Result? Instead of sending the messages it was supposed to, the machine started spewing an insulting poem about Marconi "diddling the public".