Hacking Legends · Open Source Legends<br>Get a pack

Series Two In progressHacking Legends<br>The second set. Phone phreaks, worm authors, disclosure architects and the defenders who cleaned up after all of them — 30 cards for the people who found the holes in the software the world runs on.<br>This set is being built in public. Copy is drafted, stats are in flux, and 30 of 30 cards are illustrated so far. What you see below is the working roster.<br>Nominate a hackerSee the roster →

Roster drafted29/30<br>Cards locked10/30<br>Artwork rendered30/30

What ships next<br>Finish the remaining scouting reports and lock the stat lines.<br>Close nominations and freeze the 30-card list.<br>Illustrate fronts and backs, same treatment as Series One.<br>Print run and packs, alongside the open-licensed downloads.

The working roster30 names, so far<br>Tap a card for the full scouting report. Nothing here is final until the set is frozen — argue with any of it on GitHub.

001IconicKevin Mitnick“Condor”The World’s Most Wanted HackerSocial engineering, and the manhunt that followed itSocial engineeringPhone phreakingTelecomUSA1979–202398Talked his way into more networks than he ever broke into. A teenage phone phreak who became the FBI’s most-wanted hacker, was captured in 1995, served five years, and came out the other side as a security consultant and author of The Art of Deception. He made the industry admit the obvious: the person on the phone is the vulnerability.Locked inScouting report002IconicJohn Draper“Captain Crunch”The Original Phone PhreakThe 2600 Hz whistle that opened the phone networkPhone phreakingBlue boxesUSA1970s–1980s94Discovered that a toy whistle packed in a cereal box produced the exact 2600 Hz tone AT&T used to signal a free trunk line. The blue-box scene that grew from it pulled in two young Californians named Wozniak and Jobs, and drew the blueprint for every generation of hacker that followed.Locked inScouting report003IconicRobert Tappan MorrisAuthor of the Morris WormThe 1988 worm that took down the early internetWormsUnix internalsUSA1988–present96Released a self-replicating program from MIT in November 1988 that reinfected hosts far faster than intended and knocked out a large share of the machines on the internet. First person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Went on to become an MIT professor and a co-founder of Y Combinator.Locked inScouting report004IconicPeiter Zatko“Mudge”L0pht Elder, Government InsiderTelling the Senate he could take down the internet in 30 minutesVulnerability researchPolicyPassword crackingUSA1990s–present95Front man of L0pht Heavy Industries and co-author of L0phtCrack. In 1998 the crew testified before the US Senate under their handles and warned that the internet could be taken down in half an hour. Later ran cyber programs at DARPA, worked security at Google and Stripe, and blew the whistle on Twitter’s security posture in 2022.Locked inScouting report005LegendaryKevin Poulsen“Dark Dante”The Phreak Who Won a PorscheTaking over LA phone lines to win a radio contestPhone phreakingJournalismUSA1980s–present88Seized control of every telephone line into KIIS-FM to guarantee he was caller 102 and won a Porsche. Ran from the FBI, was profiled on Unsolved Mysteries, and served time. Reinvented himself as an investigative journalist at Wired and helped build SecureDrop, the whistleblower system used by newsrooms worldwide.Locked inScouting report006LegendaryEric Corley“Emmanuel Goldstein”Publisher of 26002600: The Hacker Quarterly and Off The HookPublishingRadioActivismUSA1984–present90Founded 2600: The Hacker Quarterly in 1984 and has been broadcasting Off The Hook on WBAI since 1988. Organizer of the HOPE conferences and a defendant in the DeCSS case, where the courts first wrestled with whether publishing code is speech.Locked inScouting report007LegendaryLoyd Blankenship“The Mentor”Author of the Hacker Manifesto“The Conscience of a Hacker,” written after his arrestWritingLegion of DoomGame designUSA1980s–1990s87Member of the Legion of Doom who, hours after being arrested in 1986, wrote the essay that Phrack published as The Conscience of a Hacker. Later wrote GURPS Cyberpunk for Steve Jackson Games — the manuscript the Secret Service seized in a raid that helped spark the founding of the EFF.Locked inScouting report008LegendaryJeff Moss“Dark Tangent”Founder of DEF CONBuilding the conferences where the scene meetsCommunityConferencesPolicyUSA1993–present89Threw a going-away party for a friend in Las Vegas in 1993 and accidentally founded DEF CON, now the largest hacker gathering on earth. Also founded Black Hat, served on the US Homeland Security Advisory Council, and spent years translating between the underground and the institutions that fear it.Locked inScouting report009IconicDan KaminskyThe Man Who Patched DNSThe 2008 DNS cache-poisoning flawDNSProtocol researchCoordinated disclosureUSA2000s–202195Found a flaw that let an attacker poison DNS caches and quietly redirect any...