The 10 Most Mysterious Cyber Crimes

The first few - here's the rest.

The WANK Worm (October 1989)
Possibly the first "hacktivist" (hacking activist) attack, the WANK worm hit NASA offices in Greenbelt, Maryland. WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) ran a banner (pictured) across system computers as part of a protest to stop the launch of the plutonium-fueled, Jupiter-bound Galileo probe. Cleaning up after the crack has been said to have cost NASA up to a half of a million dollars in time and resources. To this day, no one is quite sure where the attack originated, though many fingers have pointed to Melbourne, Australia-based hackers.

Ministry of Defense Satellite Hacked (February 1999)
A small group of hackers traced to southern England gained control of a MoD Skynet military satellite and signaled a security intrusion characterized by officials as "information warfare," in which an enemy attacks by disrupting military communications. In the end, the hackers managed to reprogram the control system before being discovered. Though Scotland Yard's Computer Crimes Unit and the U.S. Air Force worked together to investigate the case, no arrests have been made.

CD Universe Credit Card Breach (January 2000)
A blackmail scheme gone wrong, the posting of over 300,000 credit card numbers by hacker Maxim on a Web site entitled "The Maxus Credit Card Pipeline" has remained unsolved since early 2000. Maxim stole the credit card information by breaching CDUniverse.com; he or she then demanded $100,000 from the Web site in exchange for destroying the data. While Maxim is believed to be from Eastern Europe, the case remains as of yet unsolved.

Military Source Code Stolen (December 2000)
If there's one thing you don't want in the wrong hands, it's the source code that can control missile-guidance systems. In winter of 2000, a hacker broke into government-contracted Exigent Software Technology and nabbed two-thirds of the code for Exigent's OS/COMET software, which is responsible for both missile and satellite guidance, from the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. Officials were able to follow the trail of the intruder "Leaf" to the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany, but that's where the trail appears to end.

Anti-DRM Hack (October 2001)
In our eyes, not all hackers are bad guys (as evidenced by our list of the Ten Greatest Hacks of All Time); often they're just trying to right a wrong or make life generally easier for the tech-consuming public. Such is the case of the hacker known as Beale Screamer, whose FreeMe program allowed Windows Media users to strip digital-rights-management security from music and video files. While Microsoft tried to hunt down Beale, other anti-DRM activists heralded him as a crusader.