MySpace Founder Tom Anderson was a Serial Hacker in the 80s!

This famous image of Tom at MySpace isn’t correct since Tom Anderson is now 37 but regardless of the fact that Tom on MySpace isn’t real, Tom Anderson is a real hacker from the 80s and have history of hacking Chase Manhattan Bank to cause one of the biggest FBI raids in history.

Now we’ve learned a much more colorful part of Anderson’s history: In 1985, when he was fourteen and in high school in Escondido, California, Anderson was subject to one of the largest FBI raids in California history after hacking into a Chase Manhattan Bank computer system and subsequently showing his friends how to do it. He was never arrested because he was a minor, but the FBI confiscated all of his computer equipment and some newspaper accounts of the incident stated incorrectly (see image below from a 1986 LA Times story) that he was “convicted in federal court of computer hacking and placed on probation” (the statements were corrected in subsequent articles). Anderson used the hacker name “Lord Flathead.”

via techcrunch

MySpace wins a big case against so-called Spam Kings, Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines.  Great job against fighting spammers!

Wallace and Rines spammed MySpace by creating their own accounts and stealing the passwords of others. They then went on to mass message users an estimated 735,925 times. Each of these messages warrant up to $300 in damages under the 2003 federal anti-spam law CAN-SPAN because they were conducted “willingly and knowingly”.

via techcrunch