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Updated July 3, 2018 13.0K votes 2.8K voters 59.0K views
Voting Rules
Vote up the hacker shenanigans that most make you want to learn to code.
Internet hacking emerged as one of the major concerns on the World Wide Web over the last decade or so. Though hacking itself presents many understandable threats to security, hilarious hacker attacks offer examples of the practice being used for good, or at least, entertainment. Hacking never looks like the movies, but the funny things hackers have done definitely make up for that.
Though malicious cyber attacks certainly should scare you, the funniest hacker attacks only come with the threat of shortness of breath and maybe a few tears of joy. Sometimes, as is often the case with Anonymous hackings, trolling, not terrifying, is the main goal.
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1,721 VOTES
Operation Cupcake Changed Bomb Instructions To Cake Recipes
Security services do an important job of taking down propaganda and information from terrorist websites. MI6 from the UK achieved this in a rather unique way back in in 2011. Rather than just take down the instructions for making pipe bombs from an online al-Qaeda magazine, they simply replaced the instructions with recipes for cake. Anyone looking to create explosives would instead only get the recipes for cupcakes taken directly from Ellen DeGeneres's "Best Cupcakes in America."
1,721 votes
2
1,319 VOTES
Iranian Nuclear Facilities Were Forced To Play AC/DC
Many suspect government agents and civilian hackers of attempting to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program by hacking into its facilities. While most of these stories fail to make headlines, one particular attack caught the attention of the media in July 2012 for its eccentric consequences.
According to reports, two buildings suffered from a hack that played the song “Thunderstruck” by AC/DC over the speakers non-stop. The music continued to play into the night and could not be silenced. The worm reportedly also attacked the automation network, though that probably felt less annoying to workers than hearing THUN - DAH deep into the night.
1,319 votes
3
1,559 VOTES
Hackers Ruined Scientology’s Google Results
When the Church of Scientology tried to take down a video critical of Tom Cruise on YouTube in early 2008, a group of hackers gave a rather mathematical rebuttal. These anonymous attackers caused no harm to the church when they Google bombed it. By shifting the church's Google rankings, the hackers made it so that when a user searched "dangerous cults," the first result to come up happened to be the Church of Scientology's website.
1,559 votes
4
1,478 VOTES
The Spanish PM Was Replaced With Mr. Bean On An Official Site
Anyone visiting the official European Union website for the Spanish Prime Minister in 2010 came face-to-face with a strange surprise. Rather than a picture of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, visitors instead saw a picture of the British sitcom character Mr. Bean. Newspapers previously likened Zapatero to the character, possibly prompting the anonymous hacker to carry out the attack. According to the authorities who ran the site, the hack took advantage of a vulnerability known as cross-site scripting.
1,478 votes
5
908 VOTES
The World's First Technological Hack: The Marconi Telegraph Troll
In 1903, the "father of modern radio," Guglielmo Marconi, was stationed on a cliff ready to demonstrate his new-fangled telegraph to the Royal Academy of Sciences. As he braced his fingers, ready to send a message more than 300 miles across the airwaves, the machine at the receiving end of the communication began pulsing strongly. The decoder spelled out the pulses into "RATS" several times before the messages launched into a seemingly random limerick. "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily," it pronounced rudely, before launching into other miscellaneous quotations. It turned out a wireless engineer named Nevil Maskelyn from the Eastern Telegraph Company had set out to prove a point: that these telegraph messages weren't private. Indeed, they weren't.
908 votes
6
1,069 VOTES
The Vogue Website Was Filled With Accessorized Dinosaurs
One hack discovered in 2013 on the Vogue website, as well as others owned by Conde Nast, involved dinosaurs. Inputting the famous Konami code on the keyboard while browsing the site led to dinosaurs appearing across the screen wearing various types of hats and headwear.
To this day, no one quite knows who carried out the attack. Some suspect an employee for the company, as this would have made it much easier to hide as an Easter egg of sorts rather than a genuine attack.
