Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

Hacker Adrian Lamo Dies at Age 37

Adrian Lamo, the former hacker best known for breaching the systems of The New York Times and turning in Chelsea Manning to authorities, has died at age 37.

Adrian Lamo, the former hacker best known for breaching the systems of The New York Times and turning in Chelsea Manning to authorities, has died at age 37.

His passing was announced on Friday by his father, Mario Lamo, on the Facebook page of the 2600: The Hacker Quarterly magazine.Adrian Lamo dies

“With great sadness and a broken heart I have to let know all of Adrian’s friends and acquaintances that he is dead. A bright mind and compassionate soul is gone, he was my beloved son…” he wrote.

Lamo had been living in Wichita, Kansas, and he was found dead in an apartment on Wednesday. The cause of death is not known, but representatives of local police said they had found nothing suspicious, The Wichita Eagle reported.

Lamo broke into the systems of companies such as Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, Microsoft and The New York Times in an effort to demonstrate that they had been vulnerable to hacker attacks.

He was arrested in 2003 and in early 2004 he pleaded guilty to computer crimes against Microsoft, The New York Times, and data analytics provider LexisNexis. He was sentenced to six months’ detention at the home of his parents.

Lamo drew criticism in 2010 after he reported Chelsea Manning (at the time U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning) to the Army for leaking a massive amount of classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Related: Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 years‎

Related: Famed Hacker Barnaby Jack Dies Days Before Black Hat Conference

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.
Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.